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.

Social Engineering in the Data Center

I listened to a TWiT podcast recently with the one and only Kevin Mitnick.  If you don't know who Kevin is, follow this link and see his story -- he is a pretty amazing security expert who has been through a lot.  There was an interesting part in the story he was telling on TWiT about HID proximity card spoofing.  The spoofing has been around a while, but he makes it sound pretty easy.  Kevin is widely known for his social engineering.

Via a tweet from @ciscoDC tonight I also read a very interesting paper on data center security.  It covers the physical side of security for a data center and related social engineering that can go on.  I think so much effort is put into digital security and facility security, that the people and process side of the business get ignored.  This paper does a very good job of conveying the importance of people and processes.  

"A terrorist isn't likely to be walking in with guns blazing and take over the building, but rather play a game of invisibility and misdirection, taking advantage of the very nature of "good-willed" or ignorant individuals...these external tests can help identify these weak areas."

Check the paper out here.

Also along the process side of things -- check out an Uptime Institue paper on using ITIL to gain data center efficency.  

Uptime Institute - Data Center Greeness

As soon as I finish posting about the Emerson white paper and how there is so much press on the topic, the very next thing I read is about a new paper from the Uptime Charrette titled Four Metrics Define Data Center Greenness

It looks to be very good (as most all of their content is), but I'll have to find another time to dig into it.

Check it out here