Many IT Conferences Next Week

It seems like every week I am perusing the tech news and can practically guarantee that there are at least a couple of IT conferences or events going on. Next week there are several that make me wish I could be two places at once.

I'll start with the best one, since it is the one I will be attending!! The Uptime Institute Symposium 2011 will be in Santa Clara and is focused on The Disrupted Data Center: Cloud, Cost, Capacity and Carbon. Besides the all-star lineup of people presenting at the conference, the case studies will be discussed by the winners of the Green Enterprise IT awards. Since the original hashtag was hijacked I'll post updates to the new #uisymp11. It should be an amazing event. I don't get out to the bay area much, so I will probably also be checking into Foursquare about every 10 feet! :)

Here are just some of the other conferences going on at/around the same time:

• Interop! May 8-12 in Las Vegas. I would love to stop by here and check out Riverbed and the deep packet inspection with Wireshark workshop. It would be pretty amazing to see Vinton Cerf - who is scheduled to talk with Interop founder Dan Lynch in honor of the shows' 25th anniversary. Over 70 product and news announcements are expected during the week.
• EMC World will also be in Vegas May 9-12. Cloud Meets BIG DATA. Hashtag #emcworld
• May 10-12 Internet World in London
• On May 13th in Seattle Microsoft will host the Cloud Intelligence Technology Conference.
• AFCOM'S Asia / Pacific Symposium. May 15-17 in Sydney
• Also in Santa Clara, CA will be the Smart Power Grid Technology Conference. This will be held May 12th and looks to have a number of interesting topics.
• The International Smart Grid Congress Asia 2011 will be held May 10-13 in Beijing.

Wrap up of Tech Conferences Last Week

The airlines made out pretty good this week from the Tech industry. There was a ton of conferences and news this past week from clouds, to energy, to Bill Gates retiring.

I, unfortunately, was not able to attend any of these conferences, primarily due to an equally hectic schedule of things going on at work. Luckily there was a lot of blogs and news sites reporting on the various events and here are some highlights of what I have seen.

• Cisco Live! in Orlando. Cisco had events in Second Life and John Chambers keynote. Here are some links to items from that conference: Michael J. Morris micro-blogged the event (complete with pictures); Cisco talked about the shortage of skilled engineers and their new elearning network; Jim Duffy comments on Cisco flushing out their data center vision; Wendell Odom comments on the announcement that Cisco will break out the CCNA certification into 3 new exams (Voice, Security and wireless; John Cox comments on the demonstration between Cisco and Nivis of a wireless IP mesh network using IPv6; and finally, there was news about he creation of a consortium to drive global security. Cisco, IBM, Intel, Juniper and Microsoft formed the Industry Consortium for Advancement of Security on the Internet (ICASI).

• GigaOm's Structure 08 - San Francisco: the two highlights of this one (IMO) if I could have attended would have been Werners Vogels (Amazon CTO) and Debra Chrapaty (Microsoft). Michael Halligan did some live blogging, Rich Miller reported from the conference and GigaOm has some videos (via Mogulus)! PC World has an article on Microsoft and the container model (I watched this one on the Mogulus videos -- very good presentation).

• O'Reilly Velocity - Burlingame, CA: This conference was about web performance and scalability. Rich Miller had several posts from the conference and O'Reilly has the video from Rich Wolski's Eucalyptus talk (Eucalyptus is an open source software infrastructure for cloud computing). You can also view the presentation given about the LinkedIn.com communication architecture.

• Data Center Energy Summit - Santa Clara: I haven't had much time to review this conference yet, but it looked pretty cool (pun intended). Rich has a post on the IBM Cool Blue rear door heat exchanger liquid cooling unit.

• LT Pact - Las Vegas: Although I had not heard of this conference before, I knew several people going to it. 3Tera was a sponsor and James Staten (Principal Analyst with Forrester) gave a keynote on Could/Grid computing. Anastasia Tubanos at WHIR blogs about the conference here.

• Catalyst Conference - San Diego: The Burton Group conference had themes of building the dynamic data center, identity management, security, wireless, SOA, and the new ways of work.
  

Busy Week Ahead

As Rich Miller pointed out -- there are a lot of events happening this week worth tracking. He points out the O'Reilly Velocity conference, Giga Om's Structure conference on Cloud Computing, and the Data Center Energy Summit.

The Energy Summit sounds like a really cool conference and I'll watch that site for all of the information that they will (hopefully) release. It has a lot of heavy hitters in the industry attending and I like "lessons learned" type conferences.

The other big conference that I will be tracking this week is Cisco Live! in Orlando. Cisco Live has been their IT and communications conference many years and now also incorporates Cisco Networkers as a part of it.

Finally - the St. Louis Cardinals (should) sweep Boston today, and then need a really good week and a half or so before they face the Cubs on the July 4th weekend.

Data Center Directions Virtual Conference

I just happened to check my e-mail at the right time today. I received a reminder of the CIO/CSO/Computerworld virtual conference that would be going on throughout the day today. I was pretty skeptical, but it was lunch time so I figured I would give it a shot. The virtual tradeshow software they are using has come a LONG way -- this was very cool.

They had a networking hub with people from all over the world talking, an expo floor with give-aways, brochures and the ability to see what other people/avatars were at the particular booth. I ventured over to the auditorium and browsed through the presentations that were scheduled. I attended one called Dream Big: Your next data center. It was interesting and I jotted down a few notes of interest:

• Barbara Bartell - VP of Information Services, Maximus;
• She pointed out the 8 critical skills for the data center:
• Risk Management
• Environmental Engineering
• Capacity Planning
• Systems Administration
• System Engineering
• Networking
• Backup Strategies
• Awareness of business needs.
• A poll during her part:
• Is a new data center or major revamp planned for this year?
• 56.8% Yes
• 43.1% No
• Aaron Wangenheim - President, Base Partners
• Discussed the power plants that had coal contracts - when those expire and aren't renewed -- what are their plans for renewable energy?
• He mentioned that he had heard of a large black box project in Chicago.
• He discussed raised floor pros/cons. He suggests NOT using raised floor when designing the data center. Hey Goolsbee -- preaching to the choir, huh?!
• Robert Mcfarlane - Interport division president, Shen,Milson & Wilke, Inc.
• bad metric -- watts/sq.ft. ; this results in grossly over-designing
  
• use watts/cabinet footprint instead for a metric.
  

Gartner Data Center Conference

Just a quick post to say that I will be attending the 26th annual Gartner Data Center Conference. This is being held in Las Vegas, Nov.27-30. I have my schedule ready to go and am really excited about attending this conference.

If anyone else will be attending and would like to meet up -- drop me an email.