After a long break, Data Engineering London is back!

Join us for our post-summer meetup: an evening of talks, lively discussion, and networking with one of London’s biggest data engineering communities.

In this edition, we’ll explore the growing relationship between **Storage & AI**. We’ll look at how the rapidly changing AI landscape is influencing data storage, and how new approaches can enable better scalability, lower costs, and faster, more efficient access to data.

The evening will feature two talks followed by a panel discussion, with plenty of time to meet other attendees, exchange ideas, and continue the conversation over food and drinks.

This event is generously sponsored by **Altinity**, whose team will also be joining us on the night. Be sure to say hello and learn more about their work.

*Schedule*

**18:00–19:00**

Networking, with food and drinks provided by Altinity

**19:00–20:30**

Talks and panel discussion

**20:30–21:00**

More networking

*Venue*

**London Art Bar**

300 High Holborn, London

*Speakers and Talks*

**Talk: There's a great future in storage: building analytic systems to hold data for AI** ([Robert Hodges](https://www.linkedin.com/in/berkeleybob2105/), CEO @ Altinity)

Remember the famous movie line, "There's a great future in plastics?" Maybe not! You probably weren't born when The Graduate came out. We'll riff on the meme, because AI is making developers care \*a lot\* about storage in analytic databases: how it's arranged, who can access it, how much it costs, and how you can scale up performance. We cover the standard models: from hot data on SSDs to frozen data in lakehouses. You'll learn the practical trade-offs and get ideas how to apply each model to help AI apps run successfully.

**Talk: AI Is Turning Storage Into Memory** ([Mischa van Kesteren](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mischavankesteren/), HPC/AI Solutions Architect @ HPE)

Everyone talks about GPUs when discussing AI infrastructure. Far fewer talk about storage. Yet modern AI workloads are increasingly limited by data movement, metadata performance, and access to persistent state. From training pipelines to RAG systems and KV cache offloading, storage is moving into the critical path of AI execution. In this talk we'll explore why traditional parallel storage systems are showing their age, and how new architectures are blurring the line between memory and storage.

**Panel: AI Is Changing the Data Layer: What Happens to Storage Next?**

AI is changing not just how we use data, but how we store, move and manage it. This panel will explore what AI workloads mean for storage architecture, how organisations should think about the cost and value of the data they retain, and whether the growing AI data stack is becoming unnecessarily complex. We’ll also get into some of the more contentious questions around storage mechanisms, real-time workloads, data movement, and whether teams are over-engineering the infrastructure needed to support AI.

Panelists:

* [Robert Hodges](https://www.linkedin.com/in/berkeleybob2105/), CEO @ Altinity

* [Sergii Ivakhno,](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergii-ivakhno/) Director of ML and Data Engineering @ XR Extreme Reach

Places are limited, so please register early to secure your spot.

**RSVP policy:** Please keep your RSVP status up to date. This helps us offer available places to people on the waitlist. Attendees with three or more no-shows may be ineligible to attend future events.

Description supplied by the event organiser.