Site Uptime Network Day 2

In the post Site Uptime Network Meeting, I mentioned that I was attending the group meeting being held by the Uptime Institute in Salt Lake City. Here's a quick summary of yesterday's festivities:

• Consonus, an IT solutions provider of Data Centers, IT Consulting and Infrastructure, and Managed Services provider, described the design of one of their datacenters.
• The attendees rode over to that datacenter and spent several hours being guided through the entire facility. The tour lead all the way from the basement (we examined provisions made for seismic activity) to the roof (we examined cooling equipment and provisions made for lightening strikes.)
• The attendees conducted a "best practices" and "opportunities" assessment of the facility and what could be observed of Consonus' personnel and procedures.
• After lunch, the CIO of Consous presented an overview of virtualization (largely virtual machine technology) and cloud computing.
• I presented "Cloud Computing Hype or Reality."

I believe the attendees got a great deal out of the examination of Consonus' best practices and even out of the various opportunities for improvement.

It is also clear to me that the adoption of virtualized environments and then the move towards cloud computing is going to have a strong impact on the design and operation of future datacenters.