'Tis the time to look ahead at the opportunities and challenges we have in store for 2009.

2008 has given us some interesting starting points for the new year.  The economy is going through a roller coaster of speculation, recovery, opportunity, and of course huge losses in value. 

We are starting to see the old world of copper "land lines" fail (such as the bankruptcy of Hawaiian Telcom in Nov 2008).  The companies with money are aggressively expanding their long distance and local loop fiber optic networks in an attempt to keep ahead of demand driven by Internet and entertainment.  Examples of this are Verizon's FIOS and the AT&T U-verse.

Data centers, like most of our economy, are going through a period of change and re-branding. 

In the stone age of data centers (circa 2005) we were able to put data centers on the street supporting somewhere around 100 watts per square foot.  This was considered really high density, supporting a vision for the next 10 years server farms and high capacity switching.

Of course that lasted all of about a year, and data center operators once again found themselves scrambling to figure out how to bring more power into the data center, and even more importantly how to bring enough cooling capacity into the data center to prevent servers and switches from burning up.