I recently hosted a webinar titled "Building The Next Data Center" and featuring Hewlett Packard's Enterprise Architect, Randi Baklini, Sybase's Architect Peter Thawley, and F5's Technical Marketing Manager, Alan Murphy, where we talked about considerations for building and augmenting data centers. This was in anticipation of our Next Data Center executive briefing event in October in Atlanta, Georgia, and the conversation was every bit as fascinating as I'd hoped.

We talked about virtualization: when that's the right move, and when that's a problem. We discussed how cloud computing outside the enterprise is starting to influence the implementation of internal cloud computing configurations. There was a lot of conversation about how data is still the key asset that must be protected and built around in any given data center, and how this influenced design.

In short, we talked a lot about the future of data centers.

Today, I found this article about looking inside Wikipedia's data center. It starts with some interesting facts (did you know all of Wikipedia runs on fewer than 300 servers) and goes quickly into the velocity of data passing through the site (80,000 SQL queries a second).

Ultimately, the conversation from the webinar and the Data Center Knowledge article (and some of the interesting linkes contained therein) all push towards a few truths: virtualization is now part of every modern data center. Data velocity is still the most powerful number to manage. Architecture has changed in the past few years, and you might need to revisit the way your data center is configured.

We talk about this further at the Next Data Center executive briefing event, and will have other related conversations online in the months to come. I hope you'll join in.