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.

If you are familiar with the bay area, Menlo Park, and in particular the offices along Sand Hill Road - this is where a large percentage of the Silicon Valley venture capital community is based.  Lew touched on the idea that VCs along Sand Hill Rd are currently encouraging their startup companies to develop their IT infrastructure within clouds, such as offered by Amazon, to eliminate the need for a lot of servers and business applications which would traditionally be managed in-house. 

The VCs are saying that if you can get the same or better service, security, and disaster recovery while reducing your operational cost by 50% or greater through deployment of services into a cloud, then any money we invest in your company will be directed towards building the business - rather than for cash burn on OPEX.

This is a really, really compelling reason for us to spend a bit more time looking at clouds, and what we may be able to reduce in OPEX while increasing our IT capabilities.  Now that the VC community has awaken to the power of cloud computing and 3^rd party data center outsourcing, it will become a trend and accepted practice of emerging businesses.  Good news for us in the data center business.

Next step - attracting cloud companies to the data center....