Storage Goes Main Street--Drive On!

Information storage has become the principal, "main street" factor in all data processing systems from large IT applications to smaller consumer based uses. The technology that supports storage must meet the cost, capacity, power, reliability and performance requirements of each application. IDEMA’s DISKCON USA 2007 will address this technology in its present as well as projected future forms, and call on industry experts to define how these principal technologies can be applied for optimum results. Subjects for discussion will be magnetic hard disk drives, flash memories, hybrid designs, and additional emerging technologies which may reside in the laboratories today, but could have a future impact on storage. In addition, business leaders and executives will present their views on the status of the storage industry and what directions are possible for the future. Consider this a conference addressing a storage roadmap for all applications – a must to attend.

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Wednesday, September 19, 2007

7:00am Registration Opens

8:30am – 9:05am: Session 1 – New Avenues for IDEMA and Storage

Dr. Joel Weiss, President, IDEMA: Looking to the Future—IDEMA and the Storage Industry

Dave Reinsel, Vice President, Storage and Semiconductor Research, IDC: The Expanding Digital Universe: Can We Contain It?

9:05 - 10:30am: Session 2a – Storage Requirements of Consumer Electronics: Mobile Applications

Chairman: Richard E. Rutledge, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Western Digital

One of the greatest growth areas for information and content storage is Consumer Electronics. These devices, enabled by the constantly decreasing cost per gigabyte of HDD and Flash, include music players (MP3 – Flash and HDD), TV show storage (DVR, PVR, and HDD enabled TVs), video and still cameras (Flash and HDD, cellular phones (Flash), Automobiles (GPS, entertainment - HDD), hand-held devices (Blackberry, Pocket PCs, etc. and backup storage devices for the home (HDD). Content transfer from one device to another has become sufficiently easy so as to allow enjoyment of music, TV, movies, etc. anywhere.

This session will concentrate on the special requirements posed by these applications where ‘ruggedness’ - reliability & robustness (e.g. for hand-held, automobiles), operational temperatures and humidity (e.g. for automobiles, PVRs and TVs), noise (e.g. home bedroom), speed (e.g. for gaming), and power (all battery operated devices), present challenges to the disk drive beyond historical levels. In addition, the ‘ecosystem’ for devices such as set top boxes (e.g. Tivo, DirecTV, DISH Network), cell phones and other hand-held devices where content is delivered by large infrastructure providers, is complex and poses challenges to HDD companies who previously dealt only with OEMs.

Attendees will experience first hand the level of marketing complexity that these opportunities add as well as the technical challenges.

Confirmed Speakers:

Maciek Brzeski, Vice President, Marketing, Storage Device Division, Toshiba: Fueling the Digital Lifestyle: Main Street Is Hungry for Storage

David Burks, Director of Product Line Management, Consumer Electronics, Seagate Technology: Hard Drives and Flash Memory-- The Virtuous Circle Of Storage Technologies

Jim Elliott, Director, Flash Marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc: Emerging Applications of Flash Memories

Richard E. Rutledge, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Western Digital: Big Boxes + Big Screens + Big Content = Big Storage

David James, Vice President, Advanced Product Engineering, Fujitsu: Cheap and Tough - Disk Drives in Consumer Applications

Larry Swezey, Director, Product Line Management, Hitachi GST: Protecting Mobile PCs with Bulk Data Encryption

10:30am – 11:15am: Break/View Exhibits

11:15am – 12:30pm: Session 2b – Storage Requirements of Consumer Electronics: The Digital Home

Chairman: Gerry Connolly, Director of Marketing, Marvell

As digital home storage requirements increase we will need new ways to organize, backup and manage our personal and commercial content. Options are many:

Will digital storage be direct attached or networked? Will content be downloaded to individual devices or streamed from a centralized home storage location?

How will this content be protected, shared and moved quickly, legally and reliably between various CE devices?

What will be the dominant interfaces applications and services for managing and distributing content?

What will drive the use of network storage in the home and when will all home and personal storage be networked?

What role will wireless technologies play to help accelerate adoption?

Attend this session to hear the answers to these questions.

Confirmed Speakers:

Dr. Simon Milner, Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Business Unit, Communications and Consumer Business Group, Marvell: Open Architecture Media Server Platforms

Patrick Hanlon, Sr. Manager of Strategic Marketing, SanDisk: Overcoming The Challenges of the Digital Lifestyle

Dr. Peter Brew, Executive Director, Emerging Products Engineering, Seagate Technology: New Ways of Connecting Storage to Consumer Electronics Devices, from the Phone to the TV

Dr. Geoff Barrall, Founder, Data Robotics Corporation, Inc.: Focus on your Digital Life, Not Managing your Storage

12:30pm - 2:00pm: Executive Roundtable Panel Discussion Featuring

Dr. Mark Re, Sr. Vice President of Research, Seagate Technology

Rich Rutledge, Sr. Vice President of Marketing, Western Digital

Pat Wilkison, Vice President, Marketing & Business Development, STEC

Scott Maccabe, Vice President General Manager, Storage Device Division, Toshiba America Information Systems, Inc.

Joel Hagberg, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, Fujitsu

Dr. Richard New, Director of Research, Hitachi GST

Iri Trashanski, Director, Business Development and Strategy, SanDisk

2:00pm – 3:30pm: Session 3 – Supporting Main Street Applications: Storage Systems Make Applications Possible

Chairman: Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin & Associates

This session looks at how enterprise storage works to provide storage requirements for growing personal and business applications. Topics to be covered include hard drive reliability in enterprise applications and data centers, storage interface developments, storage and information security protection and the growth and trends for digital storage systems to meet burgeoning commercial and consumer applications.

Confirmed Speakers:

Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin & Associates: Putting Storage into Perspective: What Storage Where?

Marty Finkbeiner, Senior Vice President, HDD Engineering, Western Digital: Power: The Next Storage Paradigm

Dr. Jon Elerath, Manager, Reliability Engineering, Network Appliance: MTBF Wars: Who Is Winning?

Rex Wong, CEO, DAVE Networks: How Social Media Drives Storage

Daniel D. Reno, Senior Strategist, Enterprise HDDs, Hitachi GST: SAS as a Unifying Force in Enterprise HDDs

3:30pm – 4:00pm: Coffee Break/View Exhibits

4:00pm – 5:00pm: Session 4 - Equipment for PMR

Chairman: Dr. Ajit Paranjpe, Vice President of Technology, Process Equipment Group, Veeco

Manufacturing of state of the art perpendicular magnetic recording heads and media requires extensive updating of both head and disk manufacturing tools as well as metrology equipment. With the higher areal densities required for future products, the tolerances and dimensions in the production of key components as well as the disk drives themselves have never been more stringent. This session will identify and focus on the key issues that must be addressed in providing state of the art vacuum deposition and metrology equipment.

Confirmed Speakers:

Sri Venkataram, Director of Field Technology and Service, Growth and Emerging Markets (GEM) Division, KLA-Tencor: Perpendicular Recording Media – Metrology and Inspection Challenges

Dr. Ajit Paranjpe, Vice President of Technology, Process Equipment Group, Veeco: Novel Alumina Deposition Techniques for Data Storage Applications

Dr. Feng Huang, Technologist, Intevac: Processing Equipment Technology for Magnetic Recording Media

Dr. Noel Abarra, Canon ANELVA: Advanced Solutions for HDD Head and Media Manufacturing

End of first day

Thursday, September 20th, 2007

8:00am: Registration Open

8:30am – 10:15am: Session 5 – HDD Technology: The Driver for Continuing Storage Success

Chairman: Dr. Ed Grochowski, Storage Consultant

A principal characteristic of HDD products throughout their road to becoming the principal storage technology in use today is the steady stream of innovations which have resulted in unprecedented capacity increases while concurrently reducing price per gigabyte. This session will concentrate on two major future innovations, patterned bit media and heat activated recording to appraise how these could continue both capacity and price trends for HDD products. In addition, key presentations extracted from a recent TMRC conference on magnetic recording will give a perspective on HDD advances and the likelihood of incorporation into future products. Attendees will experience a first-hand discussion by experts in the field allowing a concise viewpoint of the applicability of these technologies. Finally, an expert analysis of these as well as other, more esoteric innovations will provide an overall assessment of HDD technologies and drives of the future.

Confirmed Speakers:

Dr. Richard New, Director of Research, Hitachi GST: HDD Technology Trends of the Future

Dr. Mark Re, Sr. Vice President, Research, Seagate Technology: What's Hot in Heat Activated Magnetic Recording?

Dr. Tom Albrecht, San Jose Research Center, Hitachi GST: The Technology of Patterned Media: Islands of Opportunity

Hiroyuki Hieda, Senior Research Scientist, Research and Development Center, Toshiba Corp: Beyond 1Tbits/in², Recording Media Technology and the Future

Dr. Timothy Reiley, Hitachi GST: Si/SiO2 Sliders for Magnetic Recording

Michael Roen, Sr. Electrical Engineer, Advanced Product Design Engineering, HDD Division, Hutchinson Technology Inc: Exploring Low Loss Interconnects for High Data Rates in Hard Disk Drives

10:15am – 10:45am: Coffee Break/View Exhibits

10:45am – 12:45pm: Session 6 – Alternative and Emerging Storage Concepts and Products

Co-Chairmen: Dr. Michael Russak, Executive Director, IDEMA, and Dr. Chris Bajorek, Vice President of Advanced Development, Intematix

While a steady stream of innovations have enabled HDD products to provide extremely high density, cost effective mass storage, several alternative storage approaches have been under development and commercialized over the years. We are now at a point where not only are Solid State Storage devices dominating the hand held storage market, there is now competition from this sector for traditional HDD applications in the personal computing space. This session will focus on several of these emerging storage concepts and products compared to rotating magnetic storage. In particular, presentations will review and present up to date technical information on Solid State Drives, MRAM, NAND/NOR Memory, Phase Change Memory and Holographic Storage.

Confirmed Speakers:

Dr. Chris Bajorek, Vice President of Advanced Development, Intematix: The Future of Solid State and Hard Drive Data Storage

Pat Wilkison, Vice President, Marketing & Business Development, STEC: SSD's Disruptive in Ways Not Originally Considered

Ori Balaban, Director of Sales for Global Accounts, SanDisk: Transitioning Mainstream Mobile PCs to SSD

Andy Higginbotham, Director, Sales & Marketing, Hard Disk Drive Group, Samsung Electronics Company, North America: Benefits of Hybrid Hard Disk Drives

Dr. Stefan Lai, Vice President, Business Development, Ovonyx: Phase Change Memory: from Concept to Products

Dr. Jon Slaughter, Manager of MRAM Process Integration and Magnetic Materials Development, Freescale Semiconductor: Technical Overview of Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM)

Dr. Yuegang Zhang, Senior Researcher, Intel Corporation: Non-Volatile Memory Technology: Scaling Challenges & Future Trends

12:45pm – 2:15pm: Special Luncheon Keynote Speaker: Joni Clark, Chairwoman, Hybrid Storage Alliance: Hybrid Hard Drives

2:15pm – 4:15pm: Session 7 – Market Analyst Panel: Consolidation and Competition Re-shaping the Industry

Chairmsn: Oz Fundingsland, OSF International

This panel will consist of several Wall Street and industry analysts who will discuss the emerging challenges and opportunities for the hard drive industry specifically and the storage industry in general. Areas to be explored include:

The near-term and long-term outlook for revenue, profitability and stock performance of the existing players

Likely future mergers/acquisitions

Potential new competitors and partnerships with non-hard drive players

The changing go-to-market models (capacity differentiation is likely to be less important)

The ongoing impact of flash memory on hard drive strategies

The business panel has traditionally been a key session at DISKCON, based on its frank discussion and analysis of our industry combined with up-to-date audience questions for the panel. Expect a candid review of industry features and attributes and how success can be assured from topics which include pricing and margins, competitive technologies, growth of new applications and market consolidation.

Confirmed Speakers:

John Rydning, Research Manager, Hard Disk Drives, IDC: Hard Disk Drives Get Personal

Harry Blount, Research Vice President, Lehman Brothers

Krishna Chander, Senior Analyst, Storage Systems, iSuppli: Likely Future Mergers/Acquisitions

Mark Geenen, President, TrendFOCUS: Is Flash a Threat to HDDs?

Richard Kugele, Principal, Equity Research, Needham & Company, LLC: The Times They Are A-Changin’

The Conference is held in the theatre at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

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Member price (August 1 - September 18)

two day conference: $595.00

one day conference: $325.00

Non-member price (August 1 - September 18)

two day conference: $825.00

One day conference: $455.00

Member price (on-site: Lunch is subject to availability for all on-site registrations.)

two day conference: $660.00

one day conference: $355.00

Non-member price (on-site: Lunch is subject to availability for all on-site registrations.)

two day conference: $930.00

One day conference: $510.00