Linuxworld/NGDC San Francisco

As I walked the show floor at LinuxWorld/Next Generation Datacenter Conference in San Francisco, I saw evidence of a show in transistion. This reminds me of UNIX shows I attended in the early 1980s. As with UNIX, Linux has become a common part of organizational datacenters and IT staff members have become comfortable with the basics. Now, they're interested in things higher up the stack such as which operating system should host my database, my application server, my Email server and the like.

The good folks at IDG World Expo have done their best to make sure that the event stays relevent as this transition occured by running other events side-by-side. This year it was the Next Generation Datacenter Conference.

I noticed that the show floor was pretty sparcely populated during the time I was able to look around. As I walked around the hallways and peeked into session rooms, on the other hand, I could see that many of the rooms were full, some demonstrated reasonable attendence and others were empty. I'm thankful that the panel I moderated, "Virtualization 2.0", brought in an overflow crowd.

I'd like to thank Albert Lee, Chief Strategy Officer and Board Director of xkoto; Greg O'Corror, CEO of Trigence; Lawrence Stein, Engineering VP of Scalent Systems and Jonah Paransky, Marketing VP of StackSafe for helping me make the panel interesting, entertaining and useful.

I'll be traveling back on the late, late, late flight and won't be able to post tomorrow.