Top 2017 WW Storage Shows

Participating to many vendors and industry conferences for a few decades, we have ranked them based on various criteria: storage vs. non storage vs. non exclusive to storage, vendors vs. independent, #attendees, #exhibitors, #days, #sessions, technologies vs. products, marketing vs. education, venue and compile these criteria to obtain the list.

Many of them are organized on the west side of the US and we select two from Asia. We didn’t find significant enough conferences related to storage in Europe.

Flash Memory Summit in California is since few years the most popular public show dedicated on storage only, even to flash technology only.

Conferences	Global	Vendor	Independent	#Attendees	Remark
VMworld	1	1		20,000	More than storage but lot of storage
Dell EMC World	2	2		13,500	Originally very storage centric but more and more global
AWS re:Invent	3	3		40,000	All IT, storage just piece of it
Flash Memory Summit	4		1	6,200	Dedicated to flash technology
SuperComputing	5		2	12,000	Compute, network and storage for HPC
NAB Show	6		3	100,000	Really Media focus with growing storage footprint
Computex Taipei	7		4	41,000	All IT even semi-conductors, gaming, storage piece of it
Data Storage Expo (Japan IT Week with 8 shows)	8		5	89,000	Partly on storage

Plus other events and vendors conferences such Hitachi NEXT, HPE Discover, IBM, NetApp Insight, Nutanix .NEXT, Oracle OpenWorld, Pure Accelerate, Veeam ON, Veritas Vision or independent ones like CeBIT, Creative Storage, IBC, ISC, MSST, OCP, OpenStack, SNIA SDC, Storage Visions, Usenix FAST, etc.

Many of us used to attend past conferences such Storage Networking World (SNW) and we’re pretty sure readers remember Palm Desert, Scottsdale or Orlando venues with a very compelling program and impressive exhibitions floors. Associated with SNIA for several years, theses conferences, organized twice a year in US, west and east coast, had pretty good successes. Later the SNIA decided to launch the show in Europe and it became the SNW Europe conference, scheduled for many years at the end of October in Frankfurt. Both shows disappeared at different times with the growing pressure of vendors organizing their own shows.

In Europe, for several years multiple cities – London, Paris (1 and 2), Brussels, Utrecht, Moscow or Tokyo – embraced the Storage Expo concept, the last few editions taking place in Brussels and Utrecht, and Belgium is still planned in March 2018.

In France, a pretty successful expo named Forum Stockage started in 1996, renamed Forum3S in 2005, got its part of success surfing on the SAN dynamism and others technology waves. It also disappeared and then has been replaced with Storage Expo in Paris as explained above.

These stories confirm the raise of vendors’ shows that attract for several years thousands of attendees, just watch the number in the table above to realize the dimension of these conferences.

Read also:
Calendar
All storage events in the world
by Jean-Jacques Maleval | 2012.04.13 | News | [with our comments]
Conference Directory
by Philippe Nicolas