The Australian Data Centre Strategy Summit 2014

Australia's Data Centre Strategy Summit returned in 2014 after a debut in 2013 that set the standard for technology conferences.

The 2014 event, held March 18-20 at the Gold Coast Marriott Resort, boasted an agenda curated by iTnews' Brett Winterford, keynotes picked from the best brains from Australia and the world, roundtables, workshops, one-on-one meetings, two gala dinners and plenty of networking opportunities with key players from the Australian DC industry.

Download the full brochure here [pdf].

Speakers at the 2014 event

		THE GREAT DATA CENTRE OPPORTUNITY - ON AUSTRALIA'S DOORSTEP Scott Noteboom, founder and CEO, LitBit The United States is responsible for only 10 percent of global internet traffic, but serves up 35 percent of the world’s content from its data centres. Scott Noteboom played a key role in the build-out of this infrastructure as a data centre engineer for Yahoo! and Apple, but has quit the Valley to focus on emerging opportunities in Asia. There, several hundred million new internet users will soon be demanding content that - for reasons of network performance and data sovereignty - must be served from within the region. There is a tremendous opportunity to take 20 years of efficient data centre design and innovation to ensure this build-out is sustainable.

		WHEN PLAN(S) COME TOGETHER Craig Magee, Head of Infrastructure Transformation, Department of Defence At last year’s summit, Defence gave the industry an insight into the lift and shift of an entire data centre’s worth of workloads onto new architecture into a modern co-location facility. Craig Magee will provide this year’s Australian Data Centre Strategy Summit an update on how this project set Defence up for an ambitious program of change over the next few years.

		CONTAINER DATA CENTRES Xavier Desdoigts, Director of Technical Operations, Animal Logic Xavier Desdoigts will be a special guest at a presentation on container data centres led by research analyst Trevor Clarke. Desdoigts has provided technical oversight for such films as Happy Feet, The Great Gatsby and now The Lego Movie. His presentation will focus on the agility Animal Logic achieved using a container data centre.

		INTRODUCING THE MULTI-TIERED DATA CENTRE Glenn Allan, Data Centre Transformation Manager, National Australia Bank Today’s enterprise data centre assumes that IT systems - no matter how robust - are ultimately fallible. Data centre designers build into their facilities the level of redundancy required for the most mission critical system to be hosted within it. But as organisations push to the edge of efficiency, as hardware becomes increasingly resilient and as redundancy increasingly becomes a function of software, Glenn Allan envisions a future state in which facilities will be built to accommodate multiple tiers of redundancy - each with a corresponding price point.

		CALCULATING ROI ON BUSINESS CONTINUITY PROJECTS Peter Alexander, CIO, Treasury It is one of the hardest questions CIO’s and IT infrastructure managers to ever encounter: How do you calculate a return on investment when undertaking business continuity projects? How can you provide a figure that will satisfy the scrutiny of a board? Peter Alexander has faced this challenge at both the Australian Government Information Management Office and in his current role as CIO of the Treasury. In this session, he’ll provide insights into how to use risk modelling to quantify a calculable return to the business.

		DEFINING THE VIRTUAL DATA CENTRE Independent IT solutions consultant Is there any substance behind the latest trend of SDBs (Software Defined Buzzwords)? Are Software Defined Networks and Software Defined Storage bringing us closer to the Cloud's promise of computing on demand, anywhere, anytime for as little cost as possible and as little effort as possible? Can the Holy Grail of the Cloud the Virtual Data Centres (VDC) deliver this or are we painting ourselves into yet another Vendor Defined Corner?

		INTRODUCING THE 'COMPOSABLE' ENTERPRISE Mark Thiele, Executive VP of data centre technology Switch Businesses are demanding new functions and processes at low cost and high speed, driving technologists to consider new approaches to software development and technology adoption. Processes like agile and 'the composable enterprise' will drive IT shops to models for technology and solution adoption that support real-time response to business requirements. IT infrastructure managers need to become part of a strong IT ecosystem, in proximity to a wide range of independent and competitive services and solution offerings.

		DESIGNING FOR UNPREDICTABLE DEMAND Matt Gurr, Associate, Aurecon How do you design large data centre facilities, but avoid the plague of stranded plant? What are the pros and cons of a modular approach versus a centralised plant system? Aurecon’s Matt Gurr offers lessons learned from the design of extensions to Equinix and Global Switch in Sydney.

		THE ITNEWS FIBRE BREAKFAST Bevan Slattery, CEO, Megaport Serial entrepreneur Bevan Slattery founded fibre provider PIPE Networks, data centre builders NextDC and now Megaport. He joins a panel of speakers to discuss market disruption in inter-data centre connectivity.

		THE ITNEWS FIBRE BREAKFAST James Spenceley, CEO, Vocus James Spenceley rolled out one of Australia's first independent wholesale data networks (COMindico), providing international connectivity to challenger ISPs. He went on to launch one of Australia's largest data centre and fibre connectivity networks with Vocus. Spenceley will join a panel of speakers discussing investments in fibre networks between data centres.

		THE ITNEWS FIBRE BREAKFAST Skeeve Stevens, CEO, eintellego networks Skeeve Stevens is a network architect, CEO, author and speaker that has built several businesses around disruptive innovations in networking technology. Stevens will be joining our panel to discuss where end users can save money on their next connectivity deal.

		NEGOTIATING ACCESS CONTROL: WAR STORIES Mike Henshaw, engineering manager, Morgan Stanley IT-centric organisations invest significant amounts of investment into both data centre design and IT security. But the goals of both those disciplines can all too easily be undermined by a lax approach to physical security. Mike Henshaw has spent his career securing data centres in the highly sensitive financial services sector. He will share war stories from banking and other critical system sectors and provide recommendations for formulating bulletproof Access Control policies.

		TRANSFORM TODAY OR PRAY LATER Joseph Smith, strategic programs manager, HP Cloud computing has caused a tectonic shift in the IT and business markets. Any organisation that has traditionally relied on big investments in IT to ward off new competition will find it far more difficult to fend off the challenge of nimble start-ups. Australian organisations have been slow to transform and this hubris could come to haunt the economy decades down the track. Where is your organisation on the journey toward simplification of your IT infrastructure, will you even have a data centre ten years from now?

		ENTERPRISE APPS AND THE PUBLIC CLOUD Glenn Gore, technology solutions manager, Amazon Web Services As enterprise IT departments come to grips with public cloud services, which applications are proving easy wins, and which are proving a challenging fit? Glenn Gore provides an update on the state of play and describes what cultural challenges stand in the way of broader enterprise adoption.

		EMERGING OPPORTUNITIES IN ASIA Verghese Jacob, Director, FMEvolution The explosion of digital services in Asia has provided huge opportunities for data centre designers and engineers. Verghese Jacob, who has delivered facilities for organisations as diverse as Woolworths and Pacnet, discusses these opportunities within the context of a massive deal he has won with a large Chinese telco. How should data centre and IT infrastructure talent approach Asian markets?

		THE GREENFIELD DATA CENTRE: BREAKING 1.1 Bob Sharon, Director, Green Global Consulting Is it possible to build a data centre that can break the 1:1 PUE barrier? Is a NABERS six-star rating even possible? Green Global Consulting director Bob Sharon believes you can - with the right environmentals (location) and innovation (plant) in place. In this session, Sharon provides a blueprint for what technologies he would use if he had the luxury of building a greenfield facility.

		FROM DATA CENTRE TO DEVOPS: CASE STUDIES Brett Winterford, Group Editor, iTnews.com.au How have the world’s most agile companies transformed their IT operations in the name of agility? iTnews editor Brett Winterford discusses case studies from the likes of NetFlix, REA Group, Bankwest and carsales.com.au to help paint a picture of how IT Operations might function in the future.

		THE CONTAINER DATA CENTRE ALTERNATIVE Trevor Clarke, Lead Analyst, Tech Research Asia Moving select workloads out of on-premise bricks and mortar data centres into cloud or co-lo are the two dominant approaches to cost savings in the Asia Pacific region. A third, less understood or evaluated option is use of containerised data centres (CDCs), despite these facilities playing host to vast amounts of the world’s critical infrastructure and workloads. TRA lead analyst Trevor Clarke outlines the role CDCs play in the region today, with a deep dive on the business outcomes three users have achieved already.