[NCSA-discuss] USENIX storage seminar at UNC: 10/16/2008, 1 pm - 4 pm

[Todd D. Taft]

Reposting this to a larger list.  Feel free to re-post as appropriate.

Good afternoon. The USENIX Association will hold a technical lecture entitled 
"Next Generation Storage Networking: Beyond Conventional SAN and NAS" on 
Thursday, October 16 in the Hanes Art Center on the UNC Chapel Hill campus. The 
lecture begins at 1 p.m., followed by a question and answer session at 3 p.m. 
It is free of charge to faculty, staff, students and local IT professionals; 
however, advance registration is required. Sponsored by the RENCI Engagement 
Center at UNC and ITS, the lecture will explore ideas for leveraging existing 
hardware investments and for planning future migration strategies.

Topics to be covered include the following:

      * Fundamentals of storage virtualization: the storage I/O path
      * Shortcomings of conventional SAN and NAS architectures
      * In-band and out-of-band virtualization architectures
      * The latest storage interfaces: SATA (serial ATA), SAS (serial attached 
SCSI), 4Gb Fibre Channel, Infiniband, iSCSI
      * Content-Addressable Storage (CAS) and archivial file systems
      * Information Life Cycle Management (ILM) and Hierarchical Storage 
Management (HSM)
      * The convergence of SAN and NAS
      * High-performance file sharing
      * Parallel file systems
      * SAN-enabled file systems
      * Wide area file systems (WAFS)

The speaker is Jacob Farmer, a well-known figure in the data storage industry 
for over 20 years. He has authored numerous papers and articles and is a 
regular speaker at trade shows and conferences. Farmer writes an advice column 
in the Reader I/O section of InfoStor Magazine, the leading trade magazine of 
the data storage industry, and serves as one of the publication's senior 
technical advisors.  He is also CTO of Cambridge Computer Services, a national 
integrator of data storage and data protection solutions.

To register, visit http://usenixontheroadunc.eventbrite.com/ or call 
781.250.3039.

Please share this information with your colleagues around the Triangle. We hope 
to see you there.

Regards,

Ruth Marinshaw, RENCI Engagement Center at UNC Chapel Hill
Brent Caison, ITS