SNIA South Asia recently ran two technology education sessions under there theme of Tech@Break.

 
SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) is a global industry organisation, which exists to further the storage industry. They are completely vendor neutral and one of their mandates is to educate IT professionals in all aspects of storage in IT.
 
In line with this SNIA ran two events. The first in Cyberjaya kindly hosted by MDeC and the second in Singapore. The Malaysia event focused on Enterprise Flash Arrays and the Singapore event focused on Data Protection.

TECH@BREAK MALAYSIA

 
The format of each event consisted of three presentations. Two by SNIA and one by a sponsor who paid for the pleasure of presenting, but in sponsoring the events these vendors enable SNIA to keep the sessions free of charge to those that attend.
 
The SNIA presentations are completely educational they make no product references and are highly educational for IT professionals that want to take a deep dive into a given subject.
 
The third presentation given by, given by Pure Storage on Flash Arrays in Malaysia  and newly spun-off arcserve on data protection in Singapore were, as you might expect more product orientated. However, in the context of the generic SNIA presentations they followed,  it was a chance for attendees to use the educational presentations from SNIA as a “yardstick” to measure how the respective vendors stack up to SNIA recommendations.
 
We took the chance to chat with some of the attendees at both events and SNIA even shared the feedback they collated from each event with us at DSA. The overwhelming feedback is that SNIA are doing an excellent job in providing free of charge education at a deep level.

 
It is difficult to get such high quality technical advice without paying for it.  SNIA is a professional body funded by numerous storage vendors, but not “beholden” to any of them. Most impressive is that in South Asia SNIA is run by volunteers from the industry. People Like PK Gupta from EMC who take their SNIA roles seriously and never once use the opportunity to promote their own companies. This is truly valuable as some of the most experienced storage gurus in the region, such as SNIA Malaysia Chairman Chin-Fah Heoh, make themselves available to educate IT professionals and get no personal gain from doing so.
 
We strongly advise  IT professionals to take advantage of these sessions.
 
If you are interested in attending future SNIA tech Break Sessions, email SNIA South Asia  at admin@snia-sa.org  and they will register your interest for the next session.