Broadcast More data more often than not means more disks. It was ever thus - but in these cash-strapped times, just buying more kit is no longer an option. But is it really that easy to stop the growth/spend cycle and make what you’ve already got work harder? Could you solve everything by throwing a bit of elastic cloud storage into the mix, or does that just move the problem?

On Thursday the 3rd of November at 11:00 GMT we’ll be broadcasting live from our St Paul’s studio with a program, and some experts, that look at questions such as these. You can join us for free from the comfort of your desk – just make sure you bring your questions along because we’ve got a top drawer set of presenters for you.

Jon Collins from Inter Orbis is the host for the day and he’s joined by Tony Lock from Freeform Dynamics and Ian Shave from IBM. Between them they’ve got more storage experience than most of us could rustle up into one room, so it should make for an excellent discussion.

They’ll be looking at the challenge from top to bottom starting with asking themselves - how do you find out the scope of the challenge, the utilisation, the performance, the bottlenecks and the real needs of users. On fact, it will start with asking the most basic of questions, just how much storage do you have, what data is held where and just how should it be looked after. From there they’ll be diving down into the following areas:

1. How fast is data growing and is it really a problem?
2. What are the consequences of data growth?
3. What new solutions are available? - Dedupe, compression, data virtualisation, cloud, image based backups etc.
4. Are new storage management solutions only suitable for use in big companies?
5. Have storage management and administration tools still the preserve of the storage guru?
6. Why change anything now?
7. Is anything changing in the real world?
8. What steps can be taken now?

If that sounds like your bag, you can register right here. We'll look forward to seeing you on the day.