Virtualization Conference 2009 Europe
Prague, Czech Republic
May 18-19, 2009

Virtualization 2009 West Call for Papers Deadline June 30, 2009 [Click Here]
Sponsorship and Exhibit Opportunities Now Available [Click Here]
Registration Questions Attending the Conference? [Click Here]

OPENING KEYNOTE: Building Great Companies on the Cloud
by Roman Stanek - Co-Founder of NetBeans & Systinet, now CEO of Good Data

DAY TWO KEYNOTE: Cloud Computing - The Next Level of Virtualization
by David Hanacek - VCP & Sr. Systems Engineer, VMware

Already in 2009 you can get ahead of the two highest-impact IT trends changing infrastructure and operations through 2012 - Virtualization and Cloud Computing.

Virtualization technologies are shifting from point products to solution portfolios, delivering applications to the desktop, moving beyond server consolidation to enable more dynamic datacenters and serving as the foundation for some forms of cloud computing.

Virtualization is quickly becoming an important technology across all parts of the IT environment. The technology is rapidly being deployed in server, storage, networking, as well as client environments

The theme of the 6th International Virtualization Conference & Expo, to be held in Prague, Czech Republic, on May 18-19, 2009, is 'Deploying Virtualization in the Enterprise.'

Taking the Secure Migration Path to IT Virtualization

Global enterprises are mandating CIOs to reduce IT budgets, and server/desktop virtualization is a viable cost-reduction strategy. IT virtualization can offer dramatic improvements in IT efficiency and significant data center power savings. However, migrating to a virtualized data center can be complicated and deliver new security threats, particularly for heterogeneous IT environments. Before embarking on the path to virtualization, it is essential that enterprises take time to map a parallel data security migration path. This session will outline an IT Virtualization Security Plan to help IT managers effectively transition to a virtualized enterprise model while preserving high-level IT security.

Speaker Bio: Nicolas Gabriel-Robez is Sr. PM, Security Solutions at SSH Communications Security, where he gathers and defines SSH's award-winning security solutions requirements for protecting business critical data in financial institutions and large organizations. He has more than 15 years of experience in Information Communication Technology and almost 10 years of experience in the international security industry. Gabriel-Robez is an expert in IT security and compliance and recently presented at the FSI (Financial Service Industry) World Congress and the Security Conference Summit in Singapore, as well as at a number of business partner, reseller and customer conferences throughout Europe and Asia.

Making the Case for Desktop Virtualization

While server virtualization appears to have gone mainstream, the case for desktop virtualization is often less clear. However, the potential opportunity is significant with the number of client devices far exceeding the number of servers. Primary reasons why organizations will embrace desktop virtualization include: improved desktop security, simplified management and reduced management costs. This session will present a new approach to desktop virtualization where desktops and applications are fully encapsulated in a virtual workspace environment and delivered dynamically from a private or a public computing cloud, to be run locally, independent of each other directly on bare-metal PC hardware. It will also explore how this approach delivers enhanced security and centralized management, while preserving the user experience and the flexibility of local PC capabilities.

Speaker Bio: Richard Cassidy is Global Consulting Systems Engineer at Virtual Computer

Device Virtualization: Alternatives to SR-IOV

Moving device virtualization from the virtual machine (VM) to the system devices significantly improves VM performance, but also requires support from the devices. Currently, PCI and PCI Express (PCIe) devices can provide VMs with direct and secure I/O through the use of multiple functions per card, but at extra cost and inflexibility due to their silicon implementation. Alternative solutions are available that achieve the same results without the silicon dependency and at half the expense. This session will focus on new methods to achieve improvements with flexible, self-virtualizing PCIe devices, while also reducing costs.

Speaker Bio: Derek McAuley is CTO of Netronome Systems. He spent ten years as an academic at Cambridge and Glasgow Universities where he designed and taught courses in virtualization, hardware design, computer architecture, communications, distributed systems, networking, operating systems, and information theory. He was one of the founding members of the Microsoft Research Laboratory in Cambridge, and is a founding Director of the Intel Lab in Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and an Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory.

Creating an Agile Infrastructure with Virtualized I/O

As we host multiple Operating system guests onto a physical server infrastructure, the allocation of I/O capabilities to each guest becomes a constraint. I/O virtualization is a way of retaining flexibility whilst minimizing over configuring the physical I/O hardware. This session will review the basics of I/O virtualization and its interaction with OS virtualization, the differing standards including iSCSI, FibreChannel over Ethernet and InfiniBand and then compare some of the leading product solutions available on the marketplace.

Speaker Bio: Richard Croucher is an Associate Partner at Citihub where he is focused on helping Financial Services clients create and deploy agile infrastructures. He was previously Principal Architect at Microsoft, working within their online services group where he was responsible for the architecture of their management platform. Online Services are now running probably the largest Grids on the planet. Prior to this Croucher was Chief Architect at Sun Microsystems where he created the Data Centre Reference Architecture program, their Commercial Grid Utility offering and led the SAN adoption program. He has been working with virtualization technologies for over 12 years.

Virtualization and the Streamlining of Traditional Software Testing

Virtualization is quickly spreading throughout every area of IT, causing many of us to rethink the way we work. The software testing space is no different. Virtualization has caused a shift in this area, allowing traditional software testing to occur faster, with fewer resources, for a lower cost while also improving the quality of code released into production. This session will discuss how traditional test teams have merged virtualization into their daily processes, as well as the wide range of issues that these teams have experienced and the critical lessons learned along the way.

Speaker Bio: Todd Kuczaj is a Manager within Accenture's Global Testing Practice and has been with the company for 8 years. He manages global testing projects for Fortune 100 clients. He holds a Master of Science (Information Management) from Arizona State University and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Notre Dame.

Getting Ready for Cloud Computing - IT Strategy, Architecture and Security Perspective

Among the barriers to adopt cloud computing by enterprise, cloud security, application migration and integration into existing IT architecture ranks as the top barriers for cloud adoption. If you are an enterprise evaluating cloud services (SaaS, Paas, IaaS), where would you start? What should be your IT strategy to adopt cloud services? What foundational architectural elements should you be considering and investing in preparation for the cloud service adoption?

This session will also present the IT domains that are ripe for cloud services, application and security architecture, design principles that make applications cloud friendly and security and access management architecture for managing risks in cloud services. In summary, the session is aimed to educating developers, IT managers, application owners on the IT service delivery strategy, architectural considerations to prepare for cloud services and address some of the barriers including security risks in the cloud.

Speaker Bio: Subra Kumaraswamy has more than 18 years of engineering and management experience encompassing Information Security, Internet and E-commerce Technologies. He is currently leading a Security Access Management program in the IT Security office at Sun. His past roles include IT Architect, Software Engineer, Security Consultant at Accenture, Netscape, Lycos and Sun. In his spare time he tries to get his hands dirty with emerging technologies to understand the security and privacy implications for users and enterprises.

IT Security Delivered from the Cloud

Increasing use of cloud computing has raised questions about how applications can be conducted as securely in the cloud as they are inside well-protected networks. Less notice is given to new opportunities to deliver security from the cloud to these same networks. Cyber criminals have made extensive use of cloud computing by herding thousands of unsuspecting "zombie" computers into huge remotely-controlled "botnets". This session will discuss how the Anti-Virus industry is responding with cloud-based "AV protection networks" of its own.

Speaker Bio: Raimund Genes is Chief Technology Officer of Anti-Malware at Trend Micro. In this role, he is responsible for introducing new methods for businesses to detect and eradicate malware. He's also the GM for Trend Micro's Incubation Business. He brings more than 30 years of computer and network security experience to these positions.

Application Portability in a Multi-Cloud World

Organizations today must consider many factors when choosing among cloud offerings from vendors such as Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com, but being able to port applications and avoid getting "locked in" to one cloud platform is critical, and must be a primary concern for anyone planning to move mission critical applications to the cloud. Cloud lock-in can result in being committed to one public cloud infrastructure which may or may not suit application requirements over time, or it can even prevent a business from moving applications between a public cloud and its own private enterprise cloud.

Organizations, however, can take steps to maximize application portability and minimize cloud lock-in by applying the basic lock-in rule-of-thumb: the higher the cloud layer you operate in, the greater the lock-in. This session will discuss how each cloud offering varies widely when it comes to lock-in and how customers can assess the differences before committing to a specific cloud infrastructure. We will also discuss how lock-in can affect private enterprise clouds and "cloudbursting."

Speaker Bio: Uri Budnik is the Director of Business Development at RightScale. He is responsible for the ISV partner program. Prior to RightScale, he co-founded and managed the datacenter infrastructure for a technology company that provides automated podcasting tools to newspapers and magazines. Before that, he held a variety of roles at Qwest Communications in the internet services and data center division including subject matter expert for complex hosting. He won the entrepreneur of the year award from the Marshall Business School of the University of Southern California and started a company based on that award-winning business plans.

Load Balancing and Application Architecture in the Cloud

The cloud is a viable and successful means of hosting web applications, but not every application runs comfortably there. What lessons have been learned about how the architecture of applications must change so that they run successfully, reliably and efficiently on a cloud infrastructure? This session will look at the ways that application architects and developers can use load balancers and application delivery controllers to scale and manage transactions within a cloud-based application, with several real-world, measurable examples of success.

Speaker Bio: Owen Garrett is a product manager and technologist with Zeus Technology and, previous to this, was a member of Zeus' product development team. He studied Mathematics at Cambridge University, followed by Cambridge's Postgraduate Diploma in Computer Science, the oldest computer science course in the world.

Cloud Science: Astrometric Processing in Amazon EC2/S3

With the maturing of cloud computing, it is now feasible to run scientific applications in the cloud. Data storage and high performance computing resources are fundamental for scientific applications. Outsourcing these services leverages scalability, flexibility, high availability at lower prices compared with traditional in-house data processing. This session evaluates Amazon's EC2/S3 suitability for this scenario, by running a distributed astrometric process developed for the European Space Agency's Gaia mission in Amazon EC2. The aim is to demonstrate how cloud computing systems can be a cost-effective solution for HPC applications.

Speaker Bio: Paul Parsons is Founder & CTO of The Server Labs. He has over 20 years of experience in software development and was senior software engineer in the European Space Agency (ESA). After ESA, he worked in the Deutsche Boerse, Commerzbank and DG Bank, designing and implementing real time distributed systems. Since then he has been an architect in different industries, designing high performance solutions.

The Federated Cloud: Sharing Without Losing Control

Whilst a worldwide cloud of shared resources is an attractive and conceptually simple proposition, reality imposes a number of constraints that may limit or even prevent widespread take-up. In particular the fact that resources are owned by organizations, managed by individuals, come under the jurisdiction of legal bodies and are controlled by governments, makes the unrestricted sharing of resources an impossible pipedream.

However, once we accept that control over, and restrictions upon, resources are a necessary component of any real-world cloud, it should be possible to create a framework within which resources can be shared effectively. Such a framework needs to support the policies of, and all forms of agreement between, the parties offering, and utilising, shared resources. This session will describe the concepts behind the Agility framework which is capable of supporting federated clouds, and of delivering sharing without loss of control.

Speaker Bio: Stave Caughey is CEO of Arjuna Technologies Ltd, a Centre of Excellence in reliable, large-scale distributed systems building products for some of the world's leading software companies.

Practical Strategies for Moving to a Cloud Infrastructure

Medium sized and large organizations are moving, step by step, from an internal infrastructure and classical software environment towards a Cloud infrastructure + SaaS usages. Based on real European experiences, this session will present a practical, successful and innovative approach to this "Tsunami" of change.

Speaker Bio: Louis Naugès is Founder & President of Revevol, the first European Consulting organization 100% dedicated to SaaS and Cloud Computing. He has 30 years of IT experience. Very few people in Europe have his knowledge and expertise in Cloud & SaaS technologies and applications. He works directly with CIOs of very large organizations. Revevol is the first EMEA distributor of Google Apps and the largest worldwide organization deploying Google Apps is one of Revevol's clients.

Cloud Infrastructure and Application - CloudIA

To harness the potentials of Cloud Computing to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME), the university establishes a new Cloud Computing project, called Cloud Infrastructure and Application (CloudIA). The CloudIA project is a market-oriented infrastructure that leverages different VM technologies and supports Service-Level Agreement (SLA) as PaaS and IaaS models. Several unique offerings of CloudIA are overbooking of physical hardware to run more VMs, Single-Sign-On using Shibboleth for external applications, such as Google Apps and Online Learning And Training (OLAT), and creating personalized VMs and service containers on-demand. Therefore, the CloudIA project offers better resource utilization and helps SME to increase productivity and reduce IT costs.

Speaker Bio: Christoph Reich is the head of the IT and e-learning departments in the Hochschule Furtwangen University (HFU). In addition he is the director of the Cloud Research Lab at HFU. Finally, he is one of the board members of the RZ Leiter Baden-Wuerttemberg.

The Darker Sides Of Cloud Computing: Security and Availability

Cloud computing offers a fantastic opportunity to businesses of all sizes. However, there are pitfalls that no-one wants to talk about. This session will talk to some of the darker sides to cloud computing - those around security and availability. Understanding where the issues lie will help service providers to create better services and enable customers to ask the right questions of their providers.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Guy Bunker is a Distinguished Engineer at Symantec Corporation. He works in the office of the CTO, responsible for various pieces of technical strategy across the company. Currently an active member of the Enterprise Privacy Group and the Jericho Forum, he holds a PhD in Artificial Neural Networks from King’s College London, several patents, and is a Chartered Engineer with the IET.

The Nationless Cloud?

Deploying cloud resources requires a different legal analysis than using, or selling, traditional Internet infrastructure services. This session will focus on the interconnected nature, but nationless state, of cloud computing. Delegates will come away with: Five legal theories that will minimize risk regardless of the nation in which you live; a legal toolkit to address thorny contract issues in the United States and European Union; and a comparison of the risks of doing business with several major grid providers.

Speaker Bio: David Snead is a US attorney at law who specializes in technology legal issues impacting companies who provide services to others. His views on legislation affecting small-to-medium internet businesses have been quoted in the Washington Post and San Jose Mercury News. He is a frequent speaker as well as a columnist and blogger.