2013 Speaker List

Moving beyond the well-managed virtual infrastructure, many organizations today are now successfully implementing private clouds. With newly emerging tools, enterprise IT professionals can create rich automated, self-service, shared computing offerings for their stakeholders. Private clouds build on foundations like VMware, Xen, Hyper-V and KVM; and include optimized infrastructure, advanced management, automation and orchestration. Layering on service catalogs, charge-back, and self-service interfaces, IT can get out of the way of delivering their services to IT consumers.

But what are the realities of building a private cloud? How do automation and advanced orchestration fit in? How do you add automated provisioning and offer self-service? Where do cloud stacks and new cloud management tools integrate with and/or /utilize what organizations already have?
Whether you're building a private cloud to improve the efficiency of your data center or to deliver IT services more quickly, this session will arm you with the information you need to successfully plan your private cloud environment.

Who Should Attend:
This workshop targets IT managers and staff who are looking to fulfill the full promise of virtualization and cloud and transform their environments into a private cloud, especially around improving operational efficiencies, optimization, automation, and IT agility – delivering IT as a service or private cloud, while reducing costs.

Key Takeaways:
During this workshop, we will discuss the challenges that come with the move to private cloud computing, and how to prioritize, evaluate and implement the necessary solutions for virtualization and cloud management, optimization, automation and delivery as a private cloud.

3:15 - 3:40pm
The Value of PaaS in a Private Cloud World - Presented by ActiveState
Platform as a Service makes the enterprise more nimble. But how do you measure that? In this presentation, ActiveState CEO Bart Copeland and HP Cloud Services Sr. Director Dan Baigent outline the enterprise business value of PaaS in the private cloud, using enterprise use cases to exemplify how private cloud and private PaaS deliver agility, freedom of choice, scalability, ROI, innovation, portability, and security.

3:40 - 4:40pm
Comparing Cloud Orchestration Stacks
Cloud orchestration stacks are an important component in completing the move to a private cloud. In this rapid fire session, speakers representing key cloud orchestration stacks will have 10 minutes each to present their responses to key questions about the functions, features and capabilities of each cloud stack. Questions include: services and capabilities offered; languages, operating systems, APIs and image formats supported; virtualization stacks supported; management tools; portability; hardware, capacity, performance and availability constraints, pricing and more. Presentations will be followed by an open Q and A discussion.

There are strong pros and cons to both Public and Private Clouds. Many enterprises like the idea of either one or both, but the realities have not lived up to the ideal. Building a scalable, private cloud allows customization and control, but is a major undertaking with up-front costs and ongoing commitments for hardware and management software. Public clouds offer a pay as you go, low touch option, but there are many concerns around security and compliance. Integrating the two and operating a true hybrid cloud requires a new way of thinking and a new type of management. How can IT decipher which cloud (public, hybrid or private) makes the most financial sense for their specific business needs? What are the necessary metrics to build an intelligent business case for moving applications and infrastructure components to a public vs. private cloud? This session will explore the pros and cons of private and public clouds, including the best use cases and scenarios for private, public and hybrid cloud initiatives, the financial implications, and whether/how hybrid clouds might give the best of both clouds.

Many vendors and IT organizations have been busy building private and hybrid clouds using enterprise virtualization as the foundation. Some have been very successful while others found them lacking and want something built with an architecture more like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Compute Engine. Certain workloads and applications (such as databases and other resource-intensive applications) require advanced levels of performance, privacy and control that may be better suited to bare metal physical servers. The options have exploded and there are good reasons and strong feelings on all sides of this issue. Come and learn how to think about your requirements and application portfolio and your infrastructure options in a way that will help you understand the pros and cons of each and how to assess which is/are right for the job. Hear about different successful enterprise scenarios for different types of clouds, as well as application profiling, workload sizing, performance comparisons, implementation issues and more.