Hurricane Wilma spooks SNW Fall

This year's edition of SNW (Storage Networking World) Fall in Orlando, Florida had an unusual and undesirable attendee: Similar to an early Halloween ghost, Hurricane Wilma played trick or treat upon vendors and attendees.

Anyone who followed Wilma's destructive path on the news knows that the hurricane unleashed most of its fury in Southern Florida, and that Orlando, located much more North, was only grazed by the storm while the city and its vicinity had little or no damage.

Unfortunately, the impact on SNW and many of its sponsors and attendees was nonetheless significant. For example, some companies chose to cancel that trip to avoid putting their employees in a possibly dangerous or at minimum unpleasant situation, such as being stranded at an airport.

Vendors' reps I was supposed to meet in Orlando called me the Friday before the show warning that their company might cancel the trip. "We would rather not risk our life to go to a storage conference" one told me.

That person was not alone, although many people who canceled their visit when the final path of Wilma was still uncertain reversed that decision later on, when it became clear that Central Florida and Orlando would not be severely affected.

In fact, those who finally attended were not exposed to severe weather but some vendors had to face non trivial problems, such as delayed or partial delivery of their equipment for the show.

If you're familiar with the schedule of SNW, you know that by Tuesday afternoon all the computers and storage systems should be already set and ready to go, just in time for the opening to the public that very evening.

Well, not this time: On Tuesday afternoon many vendors were still feverishely putting their systems together because trucking things to Orlando had met with some unforeseen delays.

"Most of our stuff was still missing when I got here yesterday" confided On Tuesday the VP of Marketing of a major vendor, then adding despairingly: "everything was supposed to be here on Sunday"

Nevertheless, when the show finally opened to the public on Tuesday night everything (or almost everything apart from perhaps an empty stand or two) was "go".

Obviously we had been lucky: had the hurricane headed only a notch more North the outcome would have been quite different.

This year's experience should be (and perhaps will be) an occasion to rethink where to have future editions of SNW. Certainly it begs the question:" Is planning a show in a hurrican prone area right in the middle of the hurrican season a sensible thing to do"?

After all, trusting our luck is not the best way to prepare for disaster.