Earlier this month, the attention of Europe’s storage industry fixed firmly upon the UK’s Olympia Exhibition Centre as it once again played host to Storage Expo. In recent years, Storage Expo has struggled to develop a consistency. With so many hot topics and enterprise solutions to focus upon it has tended to try and be all things to all people and in the process lost some of its appeal.
A definite buzz However, this year’s show was very different. There was a definite theme to the show and a focus that extended beyond the conference hall and exhibition stands, reaching out to the aisles, corridors and even the neighbouring Pizza Express (which provided several days of carb intensive foods that added a further buzz to the event). These themes were:
Another surprise What surprised me more than the focus of this year’s show, however, was the level of knowledge and interest from the attendees in the whole networking solution. Traditionally, Storage Expo draws people who are interested in the application rather than the infrastructure. For example, anyone interested in virtualisation may spend a great deal of time talking to VMware and neglect to talk to the companies responsible for actively moving the data through the networks. Not so this year, a great amount of people wanted to discuss the complete solution from the ground up.
WDM gets sexy Why this transformation is taking place, I’m not sure. One explanation is that as IT budgets remain weak, IT managers need to know that every piece of their solution is the best that they can afford and the most capable of scaling to demand. Another reason is that data transport, particularly WDM, is again becoming a hot topic. As bandwidth demands continue to grow, more people are becoming interested in how data is moved. One need only look at some of the trending topics on Twitter to see that there is currently huge interest in mobile backhaul, data centre connectivity and hot applications such as cloud computing and virtualisation.
Bring it on With such a positive experience at this year’s show, I’m looking forward to 2010, where apparently the exhibition will be moving to Earl’s Court. I hope the change in venue doesn’t alter the change in focus.
Here are some additional video insights from the show: