Bringing Apple, Yahoo lessons to Australian data centres

iTnews is pleased to announce the first round of speakers for the 2014 Australian Data Centre Strategy Summit, again boasting a mix of both global IT innovators and facilities managers from Australia's largest organisations.

Among the keynotes for the March 2014 event is Scott Noteboom, a data centre and IT infrastructure manager who managed the roll-out of facilities for both Yahoo! and Apple.

Noteboom quit his 'dream job' as Apple's data centre manager a few months ago to start an intriguing new project in our region - stay tuned to iTnews to find out more...

We are also pleased to welcome back Glenn Allan, data centre transformation manager at National Australia Bank, whose 2013 presentation was among the best rated amongst attendees.

Steve Dumbrell joins the event in 2014 for a top-level view of cloud orchestration and software-defined networking, and how these tools will impact the IT and network infrastructure being rolled out in your data centre over the next few years. Steve has designed IT infrastructure for several of Australia's largest organisations and now provides advice to Equinix customers.

We're also looking closely at physical security at this year's event. Mike Henshaw from Morgan Stanley will be among the speakers describing the lengths to which the world's most sensitive organisations go to protect their assets.

We're also pleased to announce that HP's former Australian data centre manager Joseph Smith has agreed to speak on the IT transition large enterprise needs to consider as cloud computing breaks down barriers to entry into their markets.

The 2014 Australian Data Centre Strategy Summit will be held at the Marriott Resort on the Gold Coast from March 18-20, 2014. Tickets have been released for sale, and more speakers will be announced in November.

		THE GREAT DATA CENTRE OPPORTUNITY - ON AUSTRALIA'S DOORSTEP Scott Noteboom, founder and CEO, LitBit The United States is responsible for only ten 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 quit his dream job 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.
		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.
		DEFINING THE VIRTUAL DATA CENTRE Steve Dumbrell, global solutions architect, Equinix 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?
		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?