The longest running data center event in Europe is getting a makeover and moving to one of London’s most striking venues. DatacenterDynamics Europe will be held on the 1st & 2nd November 2016 at Old Billingsgate Market on the banks of the River Thames in the heart of the City of London.

“We are bucking the trend and rightsizing our event to focus on quality; even better discussion, better networking and to create a more intimate environment for sharing ideas,” says George Rockett, CEO, DatacenterDynamics. “We have a track record leading the really big discussions and with so much happening in the digital infrastructure space today we need to be even more innovative in order to create the best business platform for the industry. This venue and new format gives us the edge.”

This year’s event will be restricted to 2,000 invited guests who represent the top decision makers from companies that run data center-scale infrastructure – a scale that even if completely outsourced to the cloud still requires highly evolved IT operations.

Codename ZettaStructure

Cisco’s recent IoT trends report forecasts that by 2020 there will be 29 billion connected devices creating 50 ZB of data and driving a new infrastructure landscape. Against this backdrop the theme for this year’s event is ‘Building the ZettaStructure’; the collective name we are giving the physical layer of hardware, facilities and networks that extend beyond the walls of the traditional data center environment and that together form the foundation of the digital economy.

“We are in the midst of a sea change in how IT capacity is provisioned and consumed. Yet we shouldn’t confuse public cloud services with mission-critical IT requirements in every case,” says Roger Strukhoff, Executive Director of the Tau Institute for Global ICT Research. “FinTech, the IoT, and all the other new kids on the IT block must always rely on the integrity of the underlying infrastructure. That infrastructure is becoming disaggregated, to be sure, but the sheer enormity of the ZettaStructure demands a rigorous analysis by IT management to define the precise best approach for each specific enterprise.”

New format to drive a big conversation

The conference programme has been updated to include morning plenaries featuring some of the biggest names in the industry, followed by pre-lunch seminars, whilst the afternoon gives way to an entirely new format of ‘big discussions’.

“We’ve added two new tracks to the conference that open up the conversation to the compute and network hardware layer and that explore the ‘borderlands’ between physical infrastructure and SDDC,” says Merima Dzanic, Senior Conference Producer, DCD Europe. “Virtualisation has given way to the potential of data center disaggregation which will see new service providers entering this space. I am hoping to curate a conference programme that helps our audience be more collaborative and understand the opportunities.”

The new venue will host a 40,000-sq.ft expo that will include the most innovative technology vendors in the digital infrastructure space.

DCDs new delegate model means this event will be free to attend for qualified end-users – see details. Pre-registration will open on the 1st June, 2016.