The message from the VC community is clear - "don't waste our seed money on network and server equipment." The message from the US Government CIO was clear - the US Government will consolidate data centers and start moving towards cloud computing. The message from the software and hardware vendors is clear - there is an enormous investment in cloud computing technologies and services.

If nothing else, the economic woes of the past two years have taught us we need to be a lot smarter on how we allocate limited CAPEX and OPEX budgets. Whether we choose to implement our IT architecture in a public cloud, enterprise cloud, or not at all - we still must consider the alternatives. Those alternatives must include careful consideration of cloud computing.

Cloud 101 teaches us that virtualization efficiently uses compute and storage resources in the enterprise. Cloud 201 teaches us that content networks facing the Internet can make use of on-demand compute and storage capacity in close proximity to networks. Cloud 301 tells us that a distributed cloud gives great flexibility to both enterprise and Internet-facing content. The lesson plan for Cloud 401 is still being drafted.

We live in a world of clouds, SaaS, outsourcing, and Everything over IP (EoIP). The challenges IT professionals face when trying to sort through the maze of technology, globalization, SOX, HIPPA, PUE, and on,... result in daunting confusion. Mix in a few overzealous sales people, an inquiring CFO, incorrigible users within the organization, and you have all the pre-requisites for a world class, globalized, migraine headache.

Now let's go out and consider throwing all this confusion into an outsourced data center. You know your company wants to save money, have better quality facilities, be close to network and Internet exchange points, be close to carriers who can support your national distributed office. So you do what anybody might consider doing - you call on a data center sales person.

Each company has a pitch. That pitch is refined based on what resources the company has to sell, and the thought leadership provided by the data center operator will most certainly promote their "unique" product or service. As the overzealous sales person goes into their pitch, several topics will no doubt emerge:

Data center selection is an exercise in compromise. Everybody would like to have the best of all worlds, with a highly connected facility offering 24x7 smart hands support, impenetrable security, protection from all natural and man-made disasters, in addition to service level agreements offering 5-Nines power availability at $.03/kW. Not likely we will be able to hit all those desired features in any single facility.

Data center operators price their facilities and colocation based on several factors:

• Cost of real estate in their market
• Cost of power and utilities in their market
• Competition in their market
• Level of service offered (including power, interconnections, etc)
• Quality of facility (security, power density, infrastructure, etc)

Networks, Content Providers, Enterprises, and Eyeballs

The data center industry continues to evolve with mergers, acquisitions, and a healthy crop of emerging companies. New data center products and services are hitting the street, an aggressive debate on the model of selling space vs. power, and alternatives to physical data center space in the cloud are giving us a confusing maze of alternatives to meet our outsourcing needs.

The data center market is not unique. For example, in Southern California we have a wide variety of supermarkets and grocery stores including VONs, Ralphs, Albertsons, Jons, Trader Joes, Whole Foods, and lots of others. All grocery stores basically sell the same kinds of products, with very few exceptions.

What makes you go to VONs, rather than Whole Foods? Is it location? Prices? Image? A social issue?

Data Center "X" just announced a 2 MegaWatt expansion to their facility in Northern California. A major increase in data center capacity, and a source of great joy for the company. And the source of potentially 714 additional tons of carbon introduced each month into the environment.

Many groups and organizations are gathering to address the need to bring our data centers under control. Some are focused on providing marketing value for their members, most others appear genuinely concerned with the amount of power being consumed within data centers, the amount of carbon being produced by data centers, and the potential for using alternative or clean energy initiatives within data centers. There are stories around which claim the data center industry is actually using up to 5% of power consumed within the United States, which if true, makes this a really important discussion.

If you do a "Bing" search won the topic of "green data center," you will find around 144 million results. Three times as many as a "paris hilton" search. That makes it a fairly saturated topic, indicating a heck of a lot of interest. The first page of the Bing search gives you a mixture of commercial companies, blogs, and "ezines" covering the topic - as well as an organization or two. Some highlights include:

A 40 year old building with much of the original mechanical and electrical infrastructure. A 40 year old 4000 amp, 480 volt aluminum electrical buss duct, which had been modified and "tapped" often during its life, with much of the work done violating equipment specifications.

With the old materials such as buss insulation gradually deteriorating, the duct expanding and contracting over the years, the fact aluminum was used during the initial installation to either save money or test a new technology vision - it all becomes a risk. A risk of buss failure, or at worst a buss failing to the point it results in a massive electrical explosion.

Sound extreme? Now add a couple of additional factors. The building is a mixed use-telecom carrier hotel, with additional space used for commercial collocation and standard commercial office space. This narrows it down to most of the carrier hotel facilities in the US and Europe. Old buildings, converted to mixed-use carrier hotel and collocation facilities, due mainly to an abundance of vacant space during the mid-1990s, and a need for telecom interconnection space following the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Cloud interoperability and security drove passionate discussions among presenters and attendees at Cloud User '09 in San Diego this week.  A very good mix of professionals representing equipment vendors, cloud service providers, cloud software and systems developers, government, and the media rolled up sleeves, put egos aside, and drilled into issues that are impeding broad acceptance of cloud services.

The conference, sponsored by MarcusEvans, brought a lot of really interesting perspectives to the issues surrounding cloud provisioning, regulatory concerns, marketing, and the technology of cloud.  The objective - determine a course of action in the cloud community to promote and provide confidence needed for the general information and communications (ICT) community to adopt cloud services.

Igor Edelman, representing a financial services company which is an early adopter of cloud computing (he'd prefer to keep the company confidential, however I can say I am a customer!), discussed his security concerns. 

Greetings from the largest cost center in the world - the area within and surrounding the beltway of Washington D.C.  This is a location where millions of people concentrate their efforts on spending money, rather than on making money.  A land where your product is a powerpoint slide deck, rather than a factory, service, or application.  A land where consumer goods are sold at record volumes, paid for with money provided by the American tax payer.

I thought of this in great detail last evening whle jogging on the Washington and Old Dominion Trail through Reston and Herndon.  Couldn't help notice while jogging past a building surrounded by high fences, barbed wire, and more cameras per square foot than a paparrazzi cluster at a Brittany Spears sighting.

The building was a concrete fortress, not far from a residential area in Herndon, and the cameras tracked me as I ran along the trail.

Spent Wednesday in Santa Clara with Sun Microsystems attending a seminar on cloud computing and modular data centers.

One of the highlights was having an opportunity to walk through and kick the tires on their container supporting the Internet Archives (http://www.archive.org/index.php ).  This site basically tries to index media from as far back as the Internet goes in an attempt to preserve the history of the Internet.  My personal favorite feature of the internet archive is the "Wayback Machine," which has a collection of web pages  harvested from search engines and other sources.  If you have a favorite website and want to know what it looked like, or what it had for headlines in 2002, you can pull up many of those images.  I've noticed it clips some pictures and graphics, but all the text is there for you to remember.

Quite a few old guys (like me!) from the early days of the Internet showed up to hear Lew Tucker, CTO Cloud Computing for Sun Microsystems, talk about Sun's vision of cloud computing.  Great presentation, great ideas, but one discussion really hit home.  The effect today and into the future on startup companies looking for venture capital.

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.