On the 24th of May we attended the “Storage & Data Analytics – Swiss 2018” day which was organized at the Seedamm Plaza in Pfäffikon SZ.
Our interest and expertise at the ICCLab for innovative solutions in the area of Cloud Storage motivated us to join the event with the aim to exchange expertise with colleagues from both the industrial and the academic realms.
The program for the event offered a well-balanced mix of keynote speeches from top-experts in the field of storage and data analytics, presentations from specialists and companies actively working in the continuously evolving market, workshops, round-tables, and live demos on specific aspects of interest, and important moments for networking and knowledge exchange with the participants.
Besides the keynotes, the program was organized with four sessions running in parallel. The high number of persons attending the sessions and the stands proposed by the industrial partners for the event witnesses the high interest in the topics in focus. Five major areas of interest were covered: Data Management, Data Analytics, Cloud Storage, Technology and Security. You can find the complete program at the following link https://www.storage-day.ch/
The research and development interests at the ICCLab naturally attracted our interest towards presentations in the area of Cloud Storage and Technology. The first Keynote of the day by Prof. Brinkmann from the University of Mainz, guided us through a classification of Storage with a view on the future of Storage. In the subsequent presentation by IBM, Storage in container-based Cloud Infrastructures was discussed underlying the importance of persistant storage and multi-cloud environments. Of particular interest to us was the presentation given by the company SUSE. Software Defined Storage was discussed as the de-facto Standard for storage in the Cloud, highlighting also the importance of open source based solutions when they presented their Enterprise Storage solution based on Openstack and Ceph. A further interesting analysis on Cloud Storage was later presented by the company Nutanix which introduced their full-stack solution for Storage in the Cloud.
As an icing on the cake, the day was concluded by the insightful keynote given by Moshe Rappaport, Executive Technologist at IBM Research, which guided the audience in the future shedding light on the new disruptive technologies being ahead of us. The future of Storage was also predicted as this is rapidly evolving towards high density data storage applications requiring innovative research and development solutions.
In conclusion, our participation to the “Storage & Data Analytics – Swiss 2018” was well worth the time investment. The event has clearly fulfilled the expectations as an important source of inspiration for our research activities and as an opportunity for networking with experts in the field. We are already looking forward to the next event of this kind!