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I came across an interesting article in Data Center Knowledge about a device known as a heat wheel, or Kyoto Cooling, that takes advantage of outside air to cool a datacenter. I’m pretty familiar with the concept of air-side economization but I had never heard of this technology before. Sounds pretty cool. My datacenter location probably has the right climate profile to take advantage of this type of technology.
Well VISI pulled off a solid VISION 2008 technology conference yesterday in downtown St. Paul. Kudos’s go out to the VISI marketing team for the event organization and the respectable attendance. I don’t know the final attendance count but my guess is it landed in the 150-200 range. The food was good and the networking opportunities were plentiful.
I attended two sessions: Jim Akers from NetApp talking about next generation storage and Misha Govshteyn from Alert Logic talking about security. I’ve known Jim almost my whole career starting back in the old ISP days when he worked at Cisco. I found his discussion of storage virtualization and clones particularly interesting. Misha is the CTO and Co-Founder of Alert Logic and I thought he gave a very high-level, strategic overview of current security threats and defense strategies. His presentation was particularly refreshing since I’m so used to hearing thinly veiled vendor pitches during these types of presentations. I was very interested to learn how worms are becoming more stealthy. A few years ago worms were used as a way to damage computers and now they are used to extract financially valuable information.
I also had the opportunity to meet up with several prominent local bloggers and entrepreneurs including Graeme Thickens, Steve Borsch and Steve Kickert. Steve’s company, Riverock Technologies, recently launched a new team collaboration and productivity solution called OnePlace. The SaaS-based solution is written in Ruby-on-Rails and hosted at Engine Yard.
UPDATE: Graeme Thickens wrote a wonderful blog article detailing Robert Steven’s keynote speech at VISION 2008.
UPDATE2: Steve Brosch wrote an article in Minnov8 describing his experience at VISION 2008.
I don’t have a crystal ball to foretell the future of the economy and industry in America. President-elect Obama doesn’t either. But it is not hard to see that businesses may tread water during his term. Small businesses potentially face a perfect storm of reduced access to capital, increased taxes on businesses and consumers, capital gains tax increases, sales tax increases, material cost increases, energy cap and trading, and increased regulation. Community service is the new form of entrepreneurship. Wealth creation, business ownership, investing and industriousness are classified as sins. The middle class isn’t part of the working class. And those who invest the most in government are asked to pay their fair share. It will be an interesting four years.
