Competing pressures on the IT budget is a challenge faced by every CIO. After you’ve accounted for the daily costs that constitute keeping the lights on there often isn’t a lot left for innovation and value add.
A good proportion of any IT budget spend will include hardware and data centre costs, and with that in mind iTnews has helped develop the Data Centre Strategy Summit to assist IT managers tackle age-old data centre problems.
The summit provides IT professionals, suppliers and academics a forum to discuss everything from energy efficiency to monitoring, capacity planning and performance management, to name a few.
The event, held on the Gold Coast in March, offers participants the opportunity to think about the value data centres provide to their IT strategy, new ways of maximising the investment and a chance to hear first-hand experience from peers.
Mitch Miller, IT manager from St Luke’s Anglican school, has studied the problem in a new light, and flipped the role played by a data centre on its head.
His unique approach to disaster recovery and business continuity is to use an on-premise box for DR with the institutes’ production environment hosted in AWS.
Miller will expand on the advantages that kind of thinking has brought to his education institute at the summit.
As will Mark Thomas from investment bank UBS - who has much to share on the lessons he learnt from his company’s global network overhaul.
As the head of networks and data centre for UBS' APAC operations, Thomas was brave enough to volunteer the Australian business to be the first to undertake the collapse of its traditional three-layer network into a single, programmable network.
I’m also excited to be moderating a panel to discuss the value open source technology is bringing to cloud pundits via OpenStack.
Representatives from Cisco Systems, Melbourne University, Telstra and Rackspace will debate the value of OpenStack versus concerns about security and its future development path.
OpenStack is built by a thriving community of developers in collaboration with users, but can it compete with Azure, AWS and SoftLayer?
Other sessions include:
- The war for talent
- Facilities management skills in the cloud
- High performance computing
Plus case studies from Qantas, Australia Post, Teachers Mutual Bank and NSW Department of Finance.
The 2015 Australian Data Centre Strategy Summit will be held at the Marriott Resort on the Gold Coast from March 10-12, 2015.
Tickets have been released for sale. Full details of the most current program can be found here. (pdf)
