We’re all well aware that big data is driving innovation at the enterprise and startup levels, but beyond recognizing big data needs and its industry impact, we must now determine how to best implement it.  To this end, Wikibon announced late last week that co-founder and theCube co-anchor David Vellante  will serve as the moderator of ‘Primary Data Optimization: What It Should Be’ panel to be held  at Storage Networking World (SNW), in Orlando, FL on October 10-13, 2011.

“As information volumes explode and storage budgets remain the same, there is an increased need to implement primary data optimization,” said Vellante. “Our panel will provide attendees with a clear understanding of the primary data optimization market today and guide them through implementation.”

The panelists will include: Craig Nunes, vice president of marketing at HP Storage; Steve Kenniston, Global Storage Efficiency Evangelist at IBM; Larry Freeman, Senior Marketing Manager at NetApp; and Jered   Floyd, CTO and Founder of Permabit. Each of these exces’ companies has been innovating a lot around the cloud, and storage in particular lately.

Hewlett-Packard has been especially active during its current transition, having recently launched HP Cloud Services into private beta, now available to a few users who be will testing the HP Cloud Compute and HP Cloud Object Storage services. We will be hearing how the company plans on pushing towards this direction a great deal in the near-term, considering that they are shaking off their low-margin PC business to better focus on this space.

IBM in turn is taking its business to the borders of what is today considered storage SciFi. In a recent press event Big Blue announced it will be unveiling two new technologies by the end of this decade: “Racetrack” storage that puts data away in magnetic regions, and Storage Class Memory, scalable to the enterprise level.   NetApp and Permabit are also getting competitive in their respective spaces. NetApp CEO Tom Georgens gave his take on his company’s competitors and their market position in a meeting with analysts, and Permabit recently set a new benchmark for its Albireo dedupe product.