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DISA provides – Network services including satellite networks, Program Executive offices and Computing Services (my aside – DISA sounds a lot like a service provider for the rest of the DoD)

Interop NY 2009 kicked off this morning with General Manager, Lenny Heymann’s optimistic and future-looking remarks for the gratifyingly large crowd. No doubt 2009 has been a challenge for all businesses.

At the Inc. 500 Conference & Awards Ceremony I was again blessed to hear one of my favorite writers, Jim Collins, speak on the topics covered in his latest book, How the Mighty Fall: and Why Some Companies Never Give In.

Overprovisioning in hardware (data centers typically operate at less than 30% of capacity), physical space, energy and computing power is greatly reduced by moving to the cloud.

Entertained by scenes of Cisco Live’s past and quite loud 80’s music, we waited for the great man. To pass the time and make sure the OCD of us actually stayed put, there was some live texting going on.

As we watched the ScienceLogic sponsored NY Yankees team win the regular season playoff for the Mason District Virginia league it dawned on me that there are a few commonalities between what the boys and girls are learning in their “classic” American sporting event and the events that shape our field of IOM.

A day in and it’s pretty obvious there are some mega-trends running through the sessions. Cloud computing is being covered extensively – and the underlying issues of reducing opex (power and cooling costs in particular) and getting away from traditional “overprovisioning” of servers crops up again and again.

The Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Management Summit 2009 kicked off with a bang this morning, literally. Around 5am this morning, we were all woken up by a violent thunderstorm that lit the sky for miles around. Better than a wake-up call.

Cloud computing does not mean a massive-scale operation, like Google, or even that it’s someone else’s stuff. It means that we have users and providers and between them we have a brick wall.

There were a few scare stories running around a couple of years ago about the amount of data center space being built and warnings that we were returning to the boom and bust Exodus days.