Last week AutoVirt sent a tiger team out to Storage Networking World in Phoenix, AZ to stand with one of our award-nominated customers, and interact with IT and Windows professionals from across the country and the world. For us, the show was a smashing success. We met with lots of people who have been struggling with the growth of their unstructured data to the point where they’ve got to do something about it. I’ll be posting some of my analysis of those trends in a future posting, but for the meantime I wanted to share some of our other observations from the show:

The Need to Manage Unstructured Data

Our booth was packed and we were thrilled with the level of interest and activity. But why was that the case? I think the momentum can be attributed to three things:

1. The session on File Virtualization, led by AutoVirt customer Mike Williams from Five Point Capital. Mike discussed the practical applications of a global namespace and file virtualization technology, and how we helped him save over $100,000 on hardware and labor in retiring and replacing an aging file server. Mike was also nominated for an award from the SNW coordinators (see below).
2. The launch of AutoVirt 3.0 took place on Tuesday of the show. This software is a substantial release that provides a platform for managing unstructured data. With new policies that enable tiering, archiving, disaster recovery and more, as well as interoperability with Microsoft DFS & DFS-R, this release offers tangible value to people who are centralizing storage, enabling remote backup, or migrating data to a NAS environment.
3. Managing unstructured data has become a critical task for many customers now because it is taking longer than 24 hours to conduct a daily backup. With storage needs growing much faster than network pipes, lots of companies are realizing they can never meet their business continuity goals without taking this data under a higher degree of management. And many have no idea where to begin.

Congrats to Mike Williams of Five Point Capital and to State Street

Mike Williams from Five Point Capital was named a finalist for Storage Networking World's (SNW) Best Practices in Storage Awards, under the category of ‘Technology Promise and Innovation.’ This was for his deployment of the AutoVirt solution described above. Although Mike didn’t win, the company that did win in his category – State Street – was actually doing something very similar. State Street had also deployed a global namespace and used it to implement a massive rearchitecture of their storage environment. State Street’s implementation took about 18 months and although a similar project run with AutoVirt would take on the order of weeks, we congratulate both Mike and State Street for their achievements and recognition.

I continue to stand in awe of Ray Kurzweil

On a personal note, my first job out of college was at one of Ray Kurzweil’s companies. Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, now part of Nuance after a string of acquisitions, developed advanced speech recognition software for navigating computer desktops and dictating documents. Ray gave a keynote address at the show where he talked about his life’s research – the meaning of information technology, the future of computing, and overwhelming empirical data supporting his conclusions. But the reason I stand in awe of Ray is because he is a true renaissance man: entrepreneur, author, scientist, and optimist. What can I say – I just admire the guy!