iTnews is pleased to announce the first round of speakers for the 2015 Australian Data Centre Strategy Summit.
The keynote speakers include Chris Taylor, CTO of Qantas, who will provide the industry with an update on the airline's public cloud computing strategy.
This year the event is also honoured to welcome Dr Pedro Harris from the NSW Department of Finance, the architect of the state's massive investment in community cloud, GovDC. Engineer, academic and policy-maker, Pedro Harris is fascinated by industrial ecosystems.
At this year’s Data Centre Summit, he will propose that just as efficient ecosystems were once built around industrial parks or indeed shopping malls, the industrial ecosystem of the future will revolve around connectivity between data centres. If willing to collaborate, he argues telcos and Tier III data centre colocation providers will play a vital role in the development of modern cities.
Attendees will also hear from Claire Bourke, general manager of service integration and operations at Australia Post, who will discuss the massive amount of work the organisation has taken on over the past two years to consolidate its data centre operations into two co-lo facilities and make use of public cloud services.
Disaster Recovery will form a major component of the summit program - and one of several speakers confirmed to speak on the topic will be Dave Chapman, CIO at Teachers Mutual Bank.
In 2013, Teachers Mutual Bank survived for an entire week running on its secondary site. The experience led Chapman to consider an additional investment in high availability by building out an active-active pattern between the bank's primary and secondary sites in Western Sydney.
Chapman has volunteered to share what he's learned from the outage, through to making a business case and ultimately a successful execution in the name of system resilience.
And as previously announced, engineers from three of Australia’s largest supercomputing projects are also coming together for a joint keynote session to discuss how to house, power and cool highly dense computing infrastructure.
Dr Neil Stringfellow, executive director of the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Perth will discuss the use of geothermal cooling; Barry Nugent, chief technology officer at Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology will discuss plans to build a monstrous supercomputer that its hopes to house in the same co-location facilities used more broadly in the industry; and Allan Williams from the National Computational Infrastructure project will discuss what he has learned from housing NCI’s Raijin supercomputer in a facility that has experimented with free cooling.
The Summit will also feature panel sessions on:
Facilities management skills in the cloud age
Invariably, the skills required to run an end-user data centre are slightly different to those required for to run a co-lo facility, and different again to run a dedicated cloud computing facility. As more organisations choose to consolidate computer rooms, what skills should you be sharpening to prepare for a future in the cloud and when is the right time to up-skill?
Co-lo, communities and hybrid cloud
What role do co-location providers play in the vision of a hybrid cloud? What skills and capabilities are each investing in to smooth out this process for organisations that desire both control and agility? And what happens when organisations decide to go "all-in" on public cloud?
Everything OpenStack
OpenStack is shaping as an alternative cloud stack that is both open standards and open source, and is aimed squarely at those organisations with lock-in concerns when it comes to cloud services. The industry's biggest names have thrown their considerable weight behind it - are they likely to agree on every aspect of its future development? Who in Australia has signed up to commit to the platform? Can it take on the might of AWS, Microsoft and IBM?
The war for talent
The mainstream adoption of cloud technologies and automation of repeatable IT tasks requires a fresh approach to recruiting for technology talent to sit within the IT team. The technology worker of the future will be expected to have breadth of skills to complement the depth of their knowledge in a specific domain. How do you bridge the gap between the skills required today and those we'll need in the future? Joseph Smith returns to the Data Centre Strategy Summit to discuss how to attract the best talent to your IT shop.
Plus sessions on:
- Active-active configurations
- Building flatter networks
- The cloud as a DR target
- Mapping infrastructure to your next app
The 2015 Australian Data Centre Strategy Summit will be held at the Marriott Resort on the Gold Coast from March 10-12, 2015.
Tickets have been released for sale, and more speakers will be announced within weeks.
