Saw this today from ZDNet and thought it worth consideration for the conference. If you believe the numbers, you can kind of understand why the anti net neutrality camp fears the future and the pending investments:

(link)
“An AT&T executive has claimed that, without investment, the Internet’s current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010.”

…or maybe this is all propaganda

If ever there was a industry who could really take advantage of the new distribution you describe it is the health care delivery/providers. Remember when wireless phones just sweep over Eastern Europe bypassing an entire “copper based standard we had know . These game changing approaches you talk about are perfect for industries whose margins are thin and their infrastructure fractured or non-existent. Health care is a huge opportunity.

So keep an eye out as we are for how the tussle plays out in health care, and if you know of ways to save money when it comes to IT spending at federal state and research hospitals please share them and cover those stories. The health care industry needs help from a new circle of open source innovative folks who can lead.

Automation of operations is something that is always ignored in many of these service providers and most of these business models do not go far because they do not consider the operational expenses associated with these models…remember the pre-SaaS (or ASP days)…

It will be great to hear what some of the companies doing to automate the management and monitoring of the infrastructure.

OM…great foot forward to bring attention to this space.

Great idea. I echo most of what others have said, particularly those topics which are challenging business as usual in infra, such as virtualization, grid computing, Google Amazon and the other ‘big guys’ entrance into this space, etc.

Other post fodder:

When will bandwidth prices start to increase, if at all?
When will ad-supported models run their course, if at all?
What are the increased risks of security breaches with so much data stored in the cloud?

Looking forward to it…

Thanks for asking, it is always a good idea to listen to your what your audience thinks… But, please remember that the reason people come to your site is to hear what you think about something.

You provide editorial, not specifically news. There are competitors out there who do news - they do it well because they provide also provide a flow of gossip to string it all together.

What I come here for is opinion: clear, dry and sometimes even passionate opinion (as we have seen in your recent Facebook posts) on how things are evolving. Just because you don’t do news, doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep up, but you reflect more on the wider issues of a story than some of the other publishers. You should keep this whatever topics you focus on.

As for topics, it’s hard to breakdown because of “the fundamental interconnectedness of things” on the internet. This list is pretty long: applications, users, identity, location, privacy, devices, LAN, CPE, access, exchange, backhaul, authentication, ip addressing, routing, routers, networks, peering, transit, CDN, data centre, servers, power, cooling, environment, recycling…

It’s a multi-dimensional puzzle because of over the top plays so I’d like to see you cover them all, particularly if you can help us join up the dots with your analysis. The challenge will clearly be balancing quality with quantity because you need to keep a decent flow of articles.

Good luck with the evolution,

Jeremy

I enjoy your work. Write on.

Great to see you covering this space. After 5 years of you saying to me, “Dude, hosting is boring,” maybe 2008 will change your mind. Of course you have been right, but times are changing. Infrastructure and how IT in general is done will change radically in the coming 5-10 years. I give our POV on our blog, but it will be great to get more in the know commentators covering the topic. A few things of many you might want to consider:

-Should any company own servers?
-The emerging need of carrier class software and tools for cloud computing providers.
-3 big compute centers or many? How many will really emerge?
-Will DCs get overbuilt again as the new boom continues and technology increases the compute power of each foot?
-How do Dell, HP, Sun deal with the concentration of buying by cloud providers?
-What will differentiate the winners and losers? Technology?
-What role will big players like google and MS play vs specialists like Rackspace?

There is no end to topics. Good luck. Look forward to reading.

DATACENTERS/TECHNOLOGY
- How long, for example, can Dell or Sun continue to be box makers ?
This is changing with Vmware coming on board. I was recently at the
” 2007 Fall Security Summit” at Palo Atlo which took place on Dec 5th 2007. It was said that 80% of Data centers are
looking towards Virtualization. If this happens, it will be an end to the Small Boxes [ I would say it is like
going GREEN in one way, as it save lot of Power and Floor Space also. ]

• Also the number of Operating system instances has increased by 150%
  The presentation is accessible @ (link)

WEB 2.0 / IT / Security: It is interesting to see Web 2.0 companies servicing in IT.
Most of the Web 2.0 are social networking or eCommerce. I have seen very few one of them focus on IT
Ex :
GotStatus : (link)

One very important Feature is the amount of data that is being transferred from the Web Servers to Users Browser
Ex :
Digg : Downloaded 1.88 MB and there were 82 HTTP requests ( When i check today Dec 8th. for the Digg home page)
cnn.com 776 kB and 167 request.

I saw some very interesting articles in this scope as to how all the data can be sent to users browser as
one single requests thus saving the bandwidth and time. This is one very interesting area.

One person i would be most interested in reading about is the (Raju Vegesna )
There is some really good work being done in the field of networking( Ex : performance and affordability of 10GbE networks used in storage )
There are some

We all know him from the ZOHO. I wish there is blog for Semiconductor startups also.
Note : Raju Vegesna is the evangelist for Zoho responsible for promoting Zoho applications.

Cheers, Nag

The whole infrastructure thing has been hurting my brain for some time. I would greatly appreciate you providing clarity in the area.

Google, Microsoft and others are building data centers of truly historic proportions. 700,000 sq ft can stack a lot of computers. Does anyone inside and outside these companies know what they plan to do with all of these cycles? Is it just about search? Google considers it a strategic advantage? Is that possible?

A second and even more confusing issue is the role of large corporations. Are they going to be customers of this new infrastructure? Are they and can they intrust their data to these centers? Must they continue to have their own separate facilities?

A third area is type of services that will be provided? OS, MySQL, Tomcat, etc… or will they move into the application spaces?

A fourth, is Intel and CISCO. Intel got out of the data center business 4 to 5 years ago but aren’t they more logical data center owners? After all this is their equipment Google and Microsoft are buying to put in these giant centers.

Finally, what is the social impact of all this? How is it going to change what we do and who we are?

Good luck.

Jim

Isn’t it more productive to make a change in coverage an organic effect of what you do on an everyday basis. In other words, instead of just saying, “We’re going to now go this way!” you just start doing that as a natural extension of your writing and the audience graciously accompanies you inn that turn and participates all along the way.

I’m just saying. ;)

Congratulations on this decision. I know you know how excited I am about this. So much so that I blogged about it: (link) .

You guys will do a great job with this initiative. And I hope it starts are trend among other journalists as well. Because it’s not just important to understand and celebrate the latest applications and/or gimmicks, but also the implications of what’s going on underneath them.

Looking forward to continuing to follow your insights.

Abigail

Here are some wild and wacky ideas for blogs..totally unrelated to your infrastructure related post…however you asked for it and so you can take it or leave it..

1. The social impact of technology - Internet, mobile, new media. How does all this affect us a human race?

2. The importance of good ‘design’ in technology. I don’t know if you cover technology from a design perspective

3. Technology being used to tackle poverty, economic empowerment in places like India, Africa

4. Have a global view rather than a Bay area centric view. I would like to see more posts coming out of Asia, Europe. E.g. New Media in India is a completely different ball game. NewTeeVee is actually the OldTeeVee out there..if you know what I mean

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