New Florence. New Renaissance.

Structure '08

GigaOm has put together a great set of speakers/topics at their conference - lots in streaming video. Plenty of exciting stuff in the data center, cloud computing, IT infrastructure areas.

Two servers on a blade

"The server twofer–dubbed the HP ProLiant BL2×220c G5 (right)–is the first of its kind and is part of HP’s effort to target companies that have cloud computing, Web 2.0 and high performance computing infrastructure."

"Once you toss in virtualization things can get really interesting. For instance, one blade could have a Linux server, a Windows server and run Mac OS X via virtualization easily. That’s a lot of stuff for one blade."

"But even if you quibble over the energy savings claim it’s clear that HP’s new blades will save on space–another key data center cost."

ZDNet

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

Microsoft's Data Center Ambitions

Microsoft has an extremely ambitious data center strategy as it moves aggressively in to various SaaS markets. Michael Manos, Senior Director, Data Center Services, discusses in this video how they decide what data centers to build and where -  in a sustainable manner. His speech at the recent Data Center World is written up here.

Also, Microsoft will forego a traditional raised-floor environment in its new data center in Chicago, and will instead fill one floor of the huge facility with up to 220 shipping containers packed with servers.

Reducing Costs and Carbon in Data Centers

Fellow EI Tom Raftery, from Cork, Ireland recently presented on new age data centers based on work he has been doing with a low carbon site