ITEC

The latest hardware has certainly made it much easier to pack a lot more horsepower in a smaller package. Blades, of course, have shrunk the form factor of the average server, and quad-core chips make it possible to quadruple the amount of juice in the same footprint. "Blades are the fastest-growing segment in the server market," says John Enck, an analyst at Gartner. Now factor in virtualization. By setting up 10 virtual machines in a single blade, you are going to be taking up every possible unit of processing power—the only problem is that you are going to be generating a whole lot more heat.

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At some point, I'm going to stop citing every article that Nicholas Carr writes. But I can't help it. He comes up with more thoughts about cloud computing than anyone in the space, it seems. In his recent article, Nick covers the concerns raised by Richard Stallman (the free software advocate), where Stallman has been calling for us to do our computing on our own desks with our own boxes with our own software.

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IT guys have a passion for the idea of data centers in a box. In the telco days, we'd work on developing COWs, or "Central Office on Wheels" implementations. I read a great article about HP's POD data centers that shows their vision of a containerized data center.

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Chris Brogan explains how smart companies include social media in their marketing: How does one become a leading social media expert? "I decided to leave the real IT world to run off and join the circus," said Chris Brogan.

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Word of mouth makes the best salesperson, according to all the sales manuals. Are you ready to take advantage of electronic word of mouth? That's what I believe social media has become, at least for smart businesses. True, most of the "blogosphere" and Twitter-verse may be electronic gossip, but some companies have made huge advances taking word of mouth to the Web.

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I am interested to learn how innovation can be supported and if possible created. Large research centers do (sometimes) innovate and/or facilitate individual innovation. Read what Dennis Tsichritzis has to say on this. Dennis was previously President of GMD and later senior vice president at Fraunhofer, after Fraunhofer and GMD merged to form one of the largest research centers in Germany.

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