PG&E’s Bramfitt: data centers can be efficient and sustainable, but we must think beyond our current horizons

Before heading off for a little vacation, I posted the first part of a two-part interview with Pacific Gas & Electric’s Mark Bramfitt. Mark is best known in data center circles (you know, the kind of people that hang around this site and others like it) as the face of the Bay Area utility’s efforts to drive data center energy efficiency through innovative incentive programs. Now that I’m back,

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As Bramfitt departs PG&E, where will the new focus for data center energy efficiency efforts be?

If you were in the audience at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group’s Data Center Energy Efficiency Summit earlier this year, you were probably there (among other things) to hear Mark Bramfitt from Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E). Mark has been the key figure in the Bay Area utility’s efforts to drive improvements in how data centers are run to cut energy costs for the data center owners and to

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IT metrics: a snore? Not when cloud computing is involved

Amazon’s recent announcement about the availability of spot pricing for EC2 instances got me thinking a bit about the role measurement is going to play in cloud computing. In fact, I sat in on a few sessions at the Gartner Data Center Conference earlier this month focused exclusively on metrics.A snore? Actually not.The increasingly dynamic world of cloud computing is going to require (in fact,

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Cloud, the economy, and short-term thinking: highlights from Gartner's Data Center Conference

There was a lot to take in at the Gartner Data Center Conference this year, and unfortunately I had a very abbreviated amount of time actually on the ground in Vegas to do it. What was the most notable thing? In my opinion, the headline was how much Gartner has strengthened its feelings about cloud computing in 12 months.And not any 12 months, mind you, but 12 months darkened by the worse

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Is cloud a turkey for IT vendors? Thinking through its impact on end user IT spending

Amid preparations for Thanksgiving feasts here in the U.S., a couple recent predictions from IT industry experts could leave vendors with much less to be thankful for this year. I’ve seen more than one pundit say that even though cloud computing is the Next Big Thing for IT, it will, in the end, mean that less money is being spent on IT.Is cloud computing really going to mean doing more with less

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Salesforce.com and CA: using Force.com for agile and SaaS-y results

I don't normally spend too much time on application development topics, but CA has a bit of interesting SaaS-related news coming out of Dreamforce today that I thought was worth noting. And when an event bills itself as The Cloud Computing Event of the Year, I guess it's something I should at least mention.Despite salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff’s marathon keynote on Wednesday, he – and the

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Two cloud computing Rorschach tests: 'legacy clouds' and the lock-in lesson

This week's San Francisco Cloud Computing Club gathering was a great place to meet some of the movers and shakers in the cloud computing market (or at least the ones within a short drive of San Francisco). The event's concept was to spend some quality time talking through cloud computing issues with a crowd of people who spend all day thinking about the cloud and working on making it a

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Fumble! What not to do at a cloud computing conference

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