March 8th Deadline Approaching for SNW’s “Best Practices” Awards Program Nominations

FRAMINGHAM, MA. – February 11, 2010 – SNW, in conjunction with Computerworld and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), is seeking IT end-user organization case study nominations for its "Best Practices" Awards Program. SNW's twice-yearly Awards Program identifies and acknowledges excellence among users of storage technology.

Five finalists and one honoree in each category will be recognized during an Awards Ceremony taking place at SNW, April 12-15, 2010, at the Rosen Shingle Creek in Orlando, Florida. All finalists and honorees will be recognized on the event website, in an event press release, and may be featured in a special supplement of Computerworld magazine.

Honorees and finalists will be recognized in each of the following five categories:

Best Practices in Green Computing, Energy Efficiency and the

Data Center, for:

— Achievements in deploying greener IT footprints, data centers,

servers and or storage environments

— Deployments of energy efficient data centers and IT infrastructures,

EPA EnergyStar, LEEDS, and EU CoC

— Implementations of environmentally-friendly and cost-efficient

computing scenarios

Best Practices in Planning, Designing and Building a Next Generation

Storage and Server Infrastructure, for:

— Well-architected storage implementations based on a defined vision,

risk assessment, and cost/benefit justification

— Deployments that allow users to easily access stored data of all types

with converged data center networks

— Case studies on data center architectures involving technologies

including virtualization, modular storage, blade systems,

and global management

Best Practices in Storage Resiliency, Data Protection and Recovery, for:

— Strategies ensuring highly available information and data access

— Implementations of successful business continuity, data protection

and disaster recovery initiatives

— Case studies highlighting a mission-critical data access disruption

and the positive recovery results

Best Practices in Technology Innovation and Promise, for:

— Implementation of cutting-edge storage technologies shown to break

barriers and norms to achieve higher gains, results or competitive

advantage, e.g. solid state storage devices, policy management, etc.

— Use of new technologies to successfully address business objectives,

or existing technologies deployed in new and innovative ways to

achieve faster infrastructure, better analysis or lower cost

— Strategies for building a data driven enterprise, data governance

practice or other transformational program

Best Practices in Virtualization and Cloud Computing, for:

— Experiences demonstrating the value of virtualized storage and server

environments

— Case studies of successful applications of cloud computing and

managed services for data storage environments

— Implementations revealing costs, benefits and tradeoffs successfully

considered in moving to these models

Entries must be submitted online by 8:00 P.M. EST Monday, March 8, 2010. There will be no extensions.

For complete information and to submit a nomination, please visit: http://bestpractices.computerworld.com/2010/SNW/ [http://bestpractices.computerworld.com/2010/SNW/].

Eligible nominees are exclusively IT end-user organizations. Nominations of IT end-user organizations are accepted from IT users themselves, their public relations representatives, or vendors on behalf of their IT end-user customers. Multiple submissions of case studies describing different deployments per IT end-user/organization will be considered.