Links for 05 March 2008

Not much time for comments tonight and there were quite a few stories that piled up this week, so here we go:

• Verari Systems introduced their container data center yesterday. The "Forest" container solution will have a forest scene painted on the outside -- hmmm, maybe they could paint a blue ocean on it and put it on a ship!
  
• InformationWeek has a photo slide show of the Google data center being constructed in Council Bluffs, Iowa. It's been a loooong winter here -- the last picture is of some locals ice fishing.
  
• Xcel Energy has selected Stratavia's data center automation platform to streamline its IT operations. Standardization, centralizing critical processes, and scalability were listed as primary factors in the evaluation and selection of Stratavia. Stratavia was recently named a 2008 rising star from the Enterprise Management Associates.
  
• Xcel Eneregy also announced a groundbreaking wind-to-battery project. The project will take place in Minnesota and received a $1 Million grant from Minnesota's Renewable Development fund.
• A short while back when Rich Miller wrote about the BayCare Health System data center redesign, it made me think of the 'other' hospital case study I had recently seen. As I've mentioned in the past, I am intrigued by Second Life and applaud all that Cisco, IBM and other companies have done in the virtual world. Check out this blog post and this video of the Palomar Pomerado Health Cisco case study of the "Hospital of the future".
• Speaking of Second life -- when is Google going to come out with their own virtual world? Well, until then, they have Google Earth and the new Google Cities in 3D program. Pretty cool stuff.....
• BT Quraterly has a nice Cisco case study of their SONA (Service-Oriented Network Architecture) titled "A Network Architecture for Business Value Acceleration"
• Issue 7 of the EDS magazine Synnovation is "the green issue". The article I liked the most was "Making a List - Environmental Sustainability 101". We are obviously flooded with Green articles lately, and this one does a nice job of covering a high level view, what we 'should' do, what is 'right' to do, and what is 'smart' to do.
• I really enjoyed the SearchDataCenter.com article (and linked presentation)on the cost of different data center architectures.
• Finally -- since the Platespin acquisition actually happened, I thought I would take another shot in the dark prediction and say that Cassatt will be purchased by either IBM or Cisco in the near future.