Data Center Makeover

If you had told me 5 years ago, the boring data center would be one of the hottest areas in the technology industry I would have laughed.

But several trends have converged to make it so

• Cloud computing - Microsoft's Mesh offering this morning in response to what amazon, Joyent and others have been pioneering
• Breakthrough designs - Google, Sun and others , in particular, have been rethinking traditional raised floor and other accepted best practices in data center design
• Green Computing - the focus on lower energy consumption and a willingness to consider alternative energy efficient locations like Iceland
• Virtualization - VMware was one of the hottest IPOs last year, but there are several other vendors in the space
• DC Consolidation - Really aggressive consolidations like HP's internal moves from 85 data centers to 3 pairs worldwide with related savings in everything from real estate to network costs.
• Standardization - with ITIL - decades of data center operations and yellow books being formalized and best practices shared
• The move to services  - part of a broader desire for clients to reduce their capex IT spending and buy it more as as an opex service - SaaS, HaaS, PaaS
• Remote monitoring - the ability to monitor key components of network, database etc from cheaper, remote locations
• New tax incentives - seems like every state in the US and every savvy emerging country wants to attract data centers with incentives