One of the world’s largest storage and IT infrastructure conference, SNW Spring 2011, has kicked off today at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, Calif. The event is bringing together some of the top industry insiders and numerous leading companies to discuss and provide an insight into storage, infrastructure and everything in between going on in IT right now.

Organized by Computerworld and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), SNW focuses on 15 key topics ranging from energy efficiency to data management and the cloud. Over 12 executive presentations and keynotes, 120 educational sessions, 10 hands-on labs, 5 best practice awards and 3 days of SNIA Certification are spread through the action packed 4-day conference.

With thousands of attendees, SNW Spring 2011 is bringing together some of the most reputable voices in the industry, and among them are: Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple and Fusion-io’s chief scientist; Randy Mott, EVP and CIO at Hewlett-Packard; research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business Michael Schrage and more than half a dozen others.

The conference is putting a special emphasis on IT infrastructure, with some of the additional topics including virtual desktop infrastructure, datacenter concerns, backup and archiving as well as a host of related fields. From the CloudANGLE, a number of companies are tackling the known concerns and client demands around cloud architecture. Among these companies are Seminole Electric, Flight Options, Citigroup, VCU Health System, AlphaStaff, DC Water – the 6 companies represented by SNW Spring’s executive practitioners.

There are numerous of those known concerns and demands mentioned above, and one of them is the need for centralized network management and a common interface across multiple network components. This was all highlighted by Abner Germanow, Director of Enterprise Marketing at Juniper Networks highlighted to SiliconANGLE in an interview (see below).

Another example comes from the cloud, and particularly Niravnix. The start-up’s CEO, Scott Generuex, discussed how the usage-based cloud model is one of the biggest drivers in this field, and the benefit of the hybrid-cloud to enterprises as it comes in context to his company’s offerings.

Lastly there’s the need to handle the explosion of digital data we’re seeing these days, something Intel GM David Tuhy noted as being faster than the development rate of hardware, or Moore’s law. Indeed, big data analytics is one of the more prominent trends. It’s also the reason for the latest update we’ve got form storage giant EMC, who just announced it is expanding its cloud computing, big data and datacenter research program with EMC Research Europe.