Last June, we wrote on the SNW Europe coming on October 27-28 in Frankfurt, Germany:" Among the exhibitors this year, we don't see already big names like Brocade, Dell, EMC, IBM, NetApp or Oracle, that were Platinum sponsors in 2008. Fujitsu is currently the only one for 2009."

But it will be better than expected with the following companies finally recruited as exhibitors:

Platinum sponsors:

• APC by Schneider Electric (new sponsor in uninterruptible power supplies)
• DELL
• EMC
• Fujitsu
• IBM
• Symantec (returning to the event after two years away)

Gold Sponsors:

• 3PAR
• Brocade
• Bull StoreWay
• CA (returning after a year away)
• Citrix (new sponsor)
• CommVault
• Emulex
• F5 Networks
• Huawei Symantec (new sponsor)
• LSI
• OSL
• Quantum
• Sun (returning after two years away)
• Ultrium LTO (new sponsor)

Silver+ Sponsors:

• Acronis
• BakBone
• Cisco
• Cloud Storage Initiative
• Consolidate IT
• DataCore
• DataGlobal
• FalconStor
• Hitachi Data Systems
• HMK
• Iron Mountain
• NetApp
• QLogic
• Riverbed
• Sony
• Syncsort
• Tandberg Data
• Texas Memory System

Silver Sponsors:

• Orchestr
• qSkills
• Overland Storage

There are other companies participating in the event as either silver sponsors or in collaboration with other vendors such as Adaptec, Adaptive Computing,  Amazon, Arados Consulting, Bitkom, BlueArc, Ciena, ESG, FastLane, GSE, HCL technologies, IDC, Krischer Associates, N-TEC, SANboard, Starline, STEC, TheInfoPro, Verizon and VMWare.

Among the biggest storage companies, HP and Oracle (but represented by Sun), platinum sponsors in 2008, are the only ones missing. Pillar Data and Overland Storage were gold sponsors last year.

It seems that there is a new trend as some storage companies now prefer to exhibit on shows not dedicated to storage only, but to larger IT subjects. The organizers understood it as, this year, the SNW Europe is co-located with two conferences and exhibitions focusing on virtualization and data center technologies.