I got back last night from the Gartner Data Center conference in Las Vegas which runs through the end of this week. Although one of the biggest topics of conversation was cloud computing, I was most interested in learning about what’s happening more generally in the world of data centers. I’m pretty up to speed on the cloud yet the intricacies of the data center are still new to me.
A couple of great presentations
There was a great presentation yesterday morning from Ebay’s VP of technical operations, Mazen Rawashdeh, talking about their “Northstar” project and how they have completely redesigned their data center strategy to support the business (I hope to do a short post on that soon). The other presentation that I found very educational was “Extreme Data Centers – Attaining Massive scalability” by Gartner’s David Cappuccio (something else I hope to do a post about).
Learning from those in the know
The other way I got up to speed about the wild world of data centers is by talking with a couple of the folks who cover the field. The first person I met with was Rich Miller, founder of Data Center Knowledge. Here is what Rich had to say:
Some of the ground Rich covers:
- How the interest in data centers seems to grow every year
- What are the current hot topics that he see’s
- Energy and efficiency
- Data center design and thinking outside the box
- Some of the funkier designs people are coming up with
- Yahoo’s computing coop
- Modular data centers – beyond the “container craze”
If you’re interested in data centers, stay tuned for a few more entries based on the Gartner Data Center conference.
Pau for now…
Extra-credit reading
