I've been working on a new Executive Briefing called The Next Data Center, targeted to C-level and decision makers, and covering topics such as virtualization, cloud computing, security, green initiatives, cooling, and more. It's fun for me, because I worked on several data center projects in a past life, including rolling in big Sun and EMC platforms, moving data centers in a hurry (when Exodus shut down their center during the merge into C&W), and revitalizing a failed dot-bomb ISP data center that we bought shortly afterwards. Things have changed since those days, and that's the very point of the event: to learn what's coming next.
Virtualization was originally a tool for development and QA environments, but in our practices, we learned how to build production environments that counted on multiple virtual machines running on a few midsized events to start competing with much larger (and more expensive) platforms. Cooling and energy expenses were only just starting to creep up before I shifted careers, but those costs are real with the current state of the fuel economy, and companies are learning about significant cost reduction that comes as a beautiful green side effect of better planning and architecture.
And should we really even own servers and infrastructure if our core business isn't IT? That's a question no one considered seriously even two years ago, and now, cost and operations comparisons make the idea of cloud computing reasonable to consider. In less than two years, everything that was the standard in data center architecture and infrastructure has flipped upside down. Learning about what comes next has been exciting to me, but I'm curious to know what YOU think about it all, too.
To that end, if you're planning out what comes next for your data center, I'd love to talk with you more. Please don't hesitate to drop me a line: [email protected]. And thanks for reading the newsletter. Let me know what else you want to see covered here. It's your publication. And thanks for your attention.
Chris Brogan, VP Strategy & Technology, CrossTech Media.