The demand for storage has increased exponentially, placing significant stress on current "in house" storage architectures and costly overcapacity build-outs, says Patrick Harr, CEO of Nirvanix. Harr will be giving a session at SYS-CON's 'Cloud Computing Expo' (November 19-21, 2008) - a groundbreaking adjunct to the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA.

"Factoring in pressures of power, space, large capital expenditures, global performance, and availability issues, companies are faced with an exploding challenges and costs to go with the exploding storage demand," notes Harr.

"Bottom line," he continues, "companies must take a new approach to storage. They need to move from the old and out-dated storage 1.0 model of 'do everything yourself' to a new Storage 2.0 cloud model."

Harr's session will show how Cloud storage delivers persistent storage on demand to applications regardless of location and pre-defined boundaries and meets the performance and scalability characteristics of the web applications and enterprise users.

He joined from Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, where he served as entrepreneur-in-residence focusing on content, storage, and media services investments. His prior leadership roles include president and CEO of Preventsys Inc., a security risk and compliance management firm that was acquired by McAfee in 2006, and Vice President of the $300M Enterprise Products Group at McDATA Corp., an enterprise storage networking solutions company. Harr joined McDATA through the acquisition of Sanera Systems, a storage networking startup, where he ran marketing, business development and sales. Prior to Sanera, Harr ran worldwide marketing at CacheFlow and was the GM of Novell's Internet and Security Services Group.

Harr joins a star-studded lineup covering the hottest IT topic for years, with IBM, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Intel, HP and Amazon all offering, using or developing high-end computing services typically described as “cloud computing” - through which massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided as a service using Internet technologies.

Forrester Research analyst James Staten calls cloud computing "classic disruptive innovation - where the mainstream dismisses the product and small companies have time to create a real differentiated value." But there are so many offerings just now that what infrastructure architects are looking for above all is a set of organizing principles they can use to guide them in choosing between them all.

Such principles. and a host of associated topics, will be addressed in San Jose by:

• Dr Werner Vogels - VP & CTO, Amazon.com (Keynote)
• Reuven Cohen - Founder & Chief Technologist, Enomaly
• Mike Eaton - CEO, Cloudworks
• Jonathan Bryce - Founder at Mosso (Rackspace)
• Nati Shalom - CTO, GigaSpaces
• Don MacAskill - CEO & Chief Geek, SmugMug
• Mike Feinberg - Senior Vice President, Cloud Infrastructure Group, EMC
• Billy Marshall - Founder & CEO, rPath
• Dr Thorsten von Eicken - CTO & Founder, RightScale
• Songnian Zhou - Co-Founder & CEO, Platform Computing
• Patrick Harr, CEO - Nirvanix
• David Young - Co-Founder & CEO, Joyent
  
• Dave Durkee - CEO, ENKI
• John Janakiraman - CTO, Skytap
• Stuart Charlton - Chief Software Architect, Elastra
• Lars Leckie, Principal, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
• Dr Rich Wolski - Professor, U.C. Santa Barbara
• Javier Soltero - Co-Founder & CEO of Hyperic
• Omer Trajman - Director of Field Engineering, Vertica Systems
• Alan Williamson, Founder at Blog-City.com, Creator of BlueDragon
  
• Rachel Chalmers - Senior Analyst, Enterprise Software, The 451 Group