StoragePlus 2006, a two-day conference and exhibition, is taking place September 12 and 13 and is the first industry event to step back and explore storage networking in its largest context. Hence the title, signifying storage plus security, plus application management, plus Web services, plus blade servers, plus managed services, and more.

StoragePlus 2006 will start with a series of presentations and panel discussions that examine the major trends in networked storage. These include technological advances in networking (10-Gbit/s Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and iSCSI); disk-drive technologies (SATA, SAS, and FATA); virtualization; data center consolidation; and more. We will also examine how these trends are shaping the key storage paradigm of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM).

StoragePlus will also examine these trends in a broader context. Each session will look at the techniques for universal data access that emerge from infrastructure advances. We will treat issues such as the following (partial list):

• Storage plus application management
• Storage plus blade servers
• Storage plus grid computing
• Storage plus clustering
• Storage plus security
• Storage plus Web services
• Storage plus 10-Gbit/s Ethernet
• Storage plus network and systems management
• Storage plus enterprise content management
• Storage plus data center automation