Storage Decisions Chicago 2013 spans 2 days – Tuesday, June 11 & Wednesday, June 12 – and will host over 250 IT professionals at downtown Chicago’s Westin Michigan Avenue Hotel. With over 15 technical sessions, the program tackles today’s biggest storage topics, system challenges and technologies. Plus, every presentation is delivered by one of 7 independent experts, including: Jon Toigo, Curtis Preston (“Mr. Backup”), Marc Staimer, Howard Marks, Dennis Martin, Ben Woo and Phil Goodwin.

Attending Storage Decisions is like money in your pocket. Your organization wins and you win. With FREE registration, access to today’s top independent experts and reps from 20+ tech vendors – we’ll save you time, money and countless headaches by fulfilling your research needs in just one place – covering everything from storage networking for virtual environments, the state of NAS, what’s new in SSD, backup and recovery, LFTS, cloud services, converged systems and alternative storage architectures to support growing data demands.

Storage Decisions New York is our flagship event, bringing together over 500 end-users, independent experts, analysts and top solution providers to engage in thought-provoking presentations, interactive networking opportunities, and sponsor showcases featuring the latest trends and technologies impacting the storage industry. This 2-day conference is the only place you can find the industry’s foremost independent experts – and the most qualified group of storage professionals – under one roof!

This year we’ll be celebrating 13 years of providing independent and actionable advice to storage-focused IT pros. Attending is like money in your pocket. Your organization wins and you win. With FREE registration, access to today’s top independent experts and reps from 30+ tech vendors – we’ll save you time, money and countless headaches by fulfilling your research needs in just one place.

Storage Decisions San Francisco brings together 200 of your storage peers from the San Francisco bay-area, along with the industry’s top independent experts, analysts and several of the top storage vendors to provide cutting-edge perspective and un-paralleled advice for meeting the storage demands of today’s ever-changing business environment.

This event combines the multi-track content of a full conference with innovative vendor showcases and interactive sessions, resulting in 1 jam-packed day of expert content and quality networking time. Attending is like money in your pocket. Your organization wins and you win. With FREE registration, access to today’s top independent experts and reps from 30+ tech vendors – we’ll save you time, money and countless headaches by fulfilling your research needs in just one place.

Media and entertainment has attracted the interest of a number of storage vendors —both big and small —and spawned unique storage systems and architectures to provide direct attached, local networked and cloud-based storage to serve the various needs of this market. Arguably the "original" big data app, the information processing needs of media and entertainment organizations imposes unique demands on storage systems. Many creative processes are collaborative efforts that can require local simultaneous access and changes in files – which combined with the potential size of media files – place daunting requirements for storage and other studio infrastructure.

Join Storage Decisions for Action! Configuring Storage for Media and Entertainment Applications – the only vendor-neutral event 100% devoted to the media and entertainment industry’s unique data storage needs.

The trends are clear – storage is moving to the cloud. Cloud storage has certainly been one of IT’s hottest topics the past few years. But it isn’t just a hot topic anymore – cloud storage is a fundamental change to storage architecture. IT shops are collectively onboard with the idea that the cloud is viable, and are moving past the fundamental reservations held in the recent past.

With dozens of cloud storage providers, including resellers and regional services, and an assortment of cloud models – hybrid, private, and public – it’s a tough market for IT pros to navigate. Storage Decisions is here to help decipher face from fiction with our all new dinner series – Integrating Cloud Storage – featuring independent expert Stephen Foskett. Join Foskett as he cuts through the market hype and gets real about the cloud – presenting facts and technical advice that will help you determine how your organization can leverage the cloud to meet your business needs.

More likely than not, your next disaster will be a data disaster. Having spent the past 50 years amassing unmanaged data and deploying it on poorly managed infrastructure, then working to make our data available via impossible-to-secure networks, our irreplaceable asset – our data – is at greater risk in 2013 than at any time in history.

The challenge is to create a data protection strategy that works to reduce risk of catastrophic loss, corruption and disclosure, using the right technologies, and that is sustainable over time.

Brand new for 2013, The New Rules of Backup and Data Protection combines two of our most popular seminars (Next-Gen Backup School & Disaster Recovery for the 21st Century) into one full-day educational experience where attendees can get all the info they need into the tools and best practices that will bring their data backup and disaster recovery plans to the next level.

In response to rising server and desktop virtualization adoption rates – we have developed this seminar to help IT pros like you overcome the many challenges of configuring storage for virtual servers and desktops - and to help make the evaluation and implementation of storage products easier on you and your budget. Our keynote speaker, Howard Marks discusses the complications virtualization presents for storage management and the new processes, tools and technologies you can use to overcome these challenges – and all around enhance the capabilities of virtualization in your IT shop.