Cloud storage, like all areas of IT, has significant technical and economic challenges. In this session NetApp will explore these challenges including cost, migration, availability, performance, data protection, DR, inactive data, compliance and governance, security, and integration between hybrid and multiple clouds.

For many IT professionals containers, microservices, Docker and Kubernetes may not mean very much, but they are the key to Digital Transformation and therefore modern application development. In this session NetApp will provide an introduction to the technologies and discuss the current state of the cloud development market.

The recent increase in home working has resulted in the need for cost-effective, and easy to deploy and scale virtual desktop solutions. In this session, NetApp will explore how VDS costs less than VMware and Citrix, whilst delivering the security, user experience and flexibility to choose a mix of public and private cloud host platforms.

Enterprise-grade storage has evolved over the last three decades to provide a wide range of capabilities and efficiencies that native cloud storage simply cannot match. In this session NetApp will explore the benefits of their suite of cloud storage services including Cloud Manager, Cloud Volumes ONTAP, Cloud Compliance, Cloud Backup Service, Cloud Sync and Cloud Tiering.

For multi-site file sharing and collaboration OneDrive for Business would appear to be the obvious answer, but in reality it’s just not suitable for many use cases. In this session NetApp will explore how GFC provides high-performance global file sharing with real-time distributed file locking using cloud-based shares and local caches.

The cloud offers tremendous power to drive innovation, but with this power comes a great responsibility to not let costs get out of control. In this session NetApp will explore cloud pricing models and how their free Cloud Analyzer tool continuously identifies cost savings across any workload, from stateful single instances to large cloud-native stateless clusters.

In theory, the cloud enables you to pay for just what you use, but in reality, there is still huge waste. Instances might be too large and there are trade-offs between Spot, Reserved and On-demand pricing in terms of cost, availability and flexibility. In this session NetApp will explore how their Elastigroup, Ocean and Eco suite of products can keep utilisation high, costs down and commitment terms low.

All organisations want their IT services to be highly optimised and provide the required performance and availability at the lowest cost, but the reality is there is nearly always significant waste. In this session NetApp will explore how Cloud Insights can efficiently identify that waste across multiple clouds and on-premises data centres.

If your organisation is looking to get out of the on-premise data management business then you need to choose a solution that has a world-class pedigree. In this session Commvault will explore how Metallic uses proven Commvault technology, with built-in best practices, to provide fast, secure backups and speedy, granular restores to protect on-premises and cloud physical and virtual servers, Office 365 and endpoints against data loss.

Public sector organisations are under constant pressure to get the maximum ROI from their IT budgets, but at the same time they must meet performance and availability SLAs, and be compliant with the latest regulations. In this session NetApp will explore how their flexible and powerful enterprise-grade technologies allow public sector organisations to build solutions that utilise the optimal blend of on-premises and public cloud technologies.

Keeping your data secure and compliant with the latest regulations has never been more important, but at the same time more challenging. In this session NetApp will explore their many security capabilities including encryption of data at rest and in flight, immutable files and snapshots, multitenant partitioning, secure file purge and disk sanitisation, virus and ransomware protection, file system auditing and compliance reporting.

All-flash storage guarantees ultra-high IOPS and low latency, but it comes at a cost, whereas cheaper hybrid-flash storage, consisting of separate tiers of flash and HDDs, can only provide ultra-high performance to a sub-set of the data. In this session NetApp will explore the capabilities and suitability of their all-flash FAS (AFF) and hybrid-flash FAS platforms.

Flash storage has transformed the data centre, but there is no doubt that there are very few organisations who need flash performance for 100% of their data. In this session NetApp will explore their FabricPool technology which will automatically and transparently tier inactive data to public or private cloud storage to reduce costs.

Choosing between protocols comes down to a number of factors including performance, administration overhead, efficiency, flexibility and cost. In this session NetApp will explore the strengths and suitability of each and explain how their AFF/FAS unified storage platforms allow you to mix and match protocols as needed.

Historically PB scale NAS systems only scaled-out, which typically resulted in high costs. In this session NetApp will explore how FlexGroup volumes can scale a single file system both up and out, all the way to millions of IOPS, billions of files and many tens of PBs.

Object storage has been made popular by the cloud, but there are now more and more reasons to deploy your own on-premises solution. In this session NetApp will explore how a highly scalable and resilient StorageGRID system provides a great alternative to public cloud object storage.

A storage platform that has been optimised for VMware vSphere is almost certainly not going to provide the best value for video and backup workloads. In this session NetApp will explore how E-Series delivers a low capacity and throughput cost, whilst providing enterprise-grade scaling and availability, making it optimal for these workloads.

For many organisations a Fibre Channel network is at the heart of their data centre and therefore its performance and reliability are key. In this session NetApp will explore how, working in conjunction with their partner Brocade, they can provide a free health check to ensure your Fibre Channel network is performing at its best.

Ransomware is not going away, in fact if anything it’s getting worse, so every part of the infrastructure needs protecting. In this session ProLion will explore how CryptoSpike can block known and unknown attacks to on-premises and cloud-based ONTAP systems, recover just the infected files and let you know who created, changed, copied and deleted specific files.

Most organisations take regular offsite backups of all their on-premises systems, but many do not backup SaaS applications such as Office 365 and Salesforce. In this session NetApp will explore the reasons behind this, the native recovery capabilities and any shortcomings that could result in data loss.

Organisations deploy SaaS applications to simplify their IT, many would also prefer to utilise a hosted data protection solution. In this session NetApp will explore how SaaS Backup provides the necessary recoverability capabilities that organisations need to avoid data loss.

Many organisations require more than just backup and recovery for Office 365, so Commvault provides a full suite of services for the platform. In this session Commvault will explore how, in addition to backup and recovery, they can dramatically accelerate the migration process and provide powerful content searching for eDiscovery, Compliance and Data Governance.

Veeam’s success was built on its ability to efficiently backup, replicate and restore Virtual Machines, but today they go way beyond this to provide comprehensive cloud data management. In this session Veeam will explore their capabilities for protecting Office 365 data including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams.

The simplification of IT is a key goal for most organisations and it has been the major driver behind the rapid adoption of HCI, but one downside is that scaling is inferior to traditional separates. In this session NetApp will explore how their HCI solution overcomes this limitation by enabling independent scaling of storage and compute.

Historically data centre infrastructure was built using separate compute, storage and networking, often from different vendors, but today there is a drive to significantly simplify IT so integrated stacks are popular. In this session Fujitsu will explore the individual strengths and suitability of each of the three architectures.

To provide customers with the choice they need, HCI platforms need to be available with a range of different best-of-breed software options. In this session Fujitsu will explore their VMware vSAN, Nutanix Enterprise Cloud and Microsoft Azure Stack HCI solutions, that leverage high performance, energy-efficient PRIMERGY x86 servers.

HCI has become the dominant integrated stack architecture, but there are still scenarios where a converged infrastructure stack that utilises traditional storage may make more sense. In this session Fujitsu will explore their PRIMEFLEX Converged Infrastructure platforms for VMware vSphere, that are powered by PRIMERGY servers and a choice of Fujitsu’s own ETERNUS or NetApp ONTAP storage.

NetApp and Fujitsu have been partners for over 20 years which has resulted in thousands of joint customers. They collaborate on engineering projects and Fujitsu provides support for NetApp hardware in many regions around the world. In this session Fujitsu will explore the class-leading performance and reliability of PRIMERGY servers and the single pane of glass management with NetApp ONTAP storage.

Today software license costs make up a huge proportion of a typical IT budget and purchasing too many server cores will significantly push up these costs. In this session Fujitsu will explore how to determine the optimal number of servers for your next refresh, and the best CPU and memory configurations to deliver the required performance, whilst minimising software licence costs.

Regular backups are a critical discipline, but typically they cannot be taken more than once a day, and they take a long time to run and restore data. In this session NetApp will explore how ONTAP snapshots compliment traditional backups by overcoming these limitations and snapshot backups can be managed by their native tools, Veeam and Commvault.

It’s fair to say that if you go back 5 years or more Commvault had a reputation for being very powerful, but at the same time relatively expensive and complex to procure and administer. In this session Commvault will explore how today the solution is simple and cost-effective to license, and demonstrate how their transition to a modern web-based user interface has made it easy to administer.

Magnetic tape was invented way back in 1928 and cloud is seen by many as the way forward, therefore you would think it has no place in a modern data centre. In this session Commvault will explore how to successfully backup to the cloud and where tape still has some advantages.

A modern data protection solution needs to do so much more than just backup on-premises VMs, support for physical devices is still important along with protection of cloud containers, IaaS and PaaS workloads. In this session Commvault will explore how, from a single extensible platform, they provide the leading data protection solution for physical, virtual and public cloud environments.

Many organisations are considering shutting down their secondary data centres and moving the services to the cloud. In this session Commvault will explore how Commvault Disaster Recovery provides an automated disaster recovery, testing, reporting and compliance validation solution for on-premises and cloud environments.

Managing data today requires far more than just a sound backup strategy, organisations also need the ability to find specific data for legal reasons, and to be able to identify where sensitive data is stored. In this session Commvault will explore how by using a single global index, across on-premises, cloud and endpoint data, they enable organisations to respond faster to legal and compliance requests and better manage their sensitive data.

With new strains of ransomware threats on the rise, data is continually at risk despite the many steps most organisations are already taking. In this session Commvault will explore how by protecting all of an organisation’s data, across endpoints, data centres and clouds, they can identify threats, provide immutable backup copies and ensure rapid restores to minimise the impact of an attack.

Fujitsu have decades of experience managing the data of many large enterprise customers, over this time they have developed a comprehensive backup target portfolio. In this session Fujitsu will explore the ETERNUS CS data protection appliances and ETERNUS LT tape systems, which can both scale to meet the needs of a small business all the way up to a large enterprise.

As organisations continue to expand their usage of AWS and Azure, they need a simple and cost-effective data protection strategy. In this session Veeam will explore their standalone solution for backup within AWS and Azure, and their integrated solution for cloud, virtual and physical workloads that enables seamless cloud mobility and data portability.

Snapshots and backups work better together and Veeam Backup & Replication has more integration points with NetApp ONTAP than any other storage platform. In this session Veeam will explore how by managing ONTAP snapshots they are able to take backups every few minutes and perform granular and volume restores in seconds, and with the v10 release they now have a powerful ONTAP NAS backup solution.

VAO provides full DR orchestration for NetApp ONTAP platforms by automating testing, failover, failback and the creation of compliance documentation. In this session Veeam will explore how it manages ONTAP SnapMirror as well as Veeam Backup & Replication jobs, and how it’s a lower cost alternative to VMware Site Recovery Manager.

NetApp ONTAP snapshot backups are very powerful, but they lack a couple of key features. In this session ProLion will explore how RestoreManager adds a central backup catalog to on-premises and cloud-based ONTAP systems, that enables searching, filtering and one click restore, and backup to S3 object storage.

Demand for greater Wi-Fi capacity and reliability is relentless, and aging Wi-Fi 4 (802.11n) networks just cannot keep-up, which should not come as a surprise as the standard was ratified way back in 2009. In this session Ruckus will explore the many benefits that an upgrade to Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) will bring to your organisation.

Wi-Fi sizing is complex, you need to determine the optimal number and placement of APs to provide the necessary coverage. For capacity you must determine how many spatial streams they each need and to do this you should consider user count, data usage profiles, concurrency, client types and more. In this session Ruckus will explore how you can bring a little science to sizing your next Wi-Fi refresh project.

The objective of good Wi-Fi management is to keep it simple, performant, reliable and most importantly automated. Dedicated teams, in large organisations, will have the time and knowledge to optimise the network, but most will simply want to get as close to plug-and-play as possible. In this session Ruckus will explore the management options available and their suitability.

Most organisations have a wide range of IT, employee owned and guest devices, including laptops, printers, and mobiles, that all need to be securely and efficiently onboarded and authenticated to the Wi-Fi network. In this session Ruckus will explore the many options available including username/password and certificate authentication, guest access via vouchers, e-mail, SMS, sponsors and self-service, MAC authentication and Dynamic Pre-Shared Keys.

Once you have determined the optimal onboarding and authentication scenarios your organisation needs to support, you must workout how best to deploy them. In this session Ruckus will explore the options built-in to their various management platforms along with a dedicated solution that provides a very powerful and flexible workflow engine that can meet the needs of the most demanding environments.

Home Wi-Fi has a reputation for poor coverage and being somewhat unreliable, so as more and more users work from home there is a need to deliver the same quality they experience in the office. In this session Ruckus will explore how they can deliver a superior home-user experience whilst maintaining the security and centralised control mandated by IT.

Ruckus has a broad range of switches that can meet most edge, distribution and core requirements. They are suitable for small deployments, but can scale up to 12 devices per stack and with state-of-the-art PoE and multi-gigabit Ethernet support they are optimised for Wi-Fi AP connectivity. In this session Ruckus will explore the capabilities of the ICX range and how unified AP and switch management is helping to simplify administration and reduce costs.