Josh Wieder

In a missive to the estimable Jean-Baptiste Leroy, portly Founding Father Benjamin Franklin once wrote, speaking of the longevity of America's fledgling constitution, "[...] in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." It is with the utmost respect then, that I would slightly plagiarize that hackneyed turn of phrase for use by the engineers, owners and managers of the data center: for us, the only two certainties are spam and visits from Federal law enforcement. This noble profession of ours sits at the crossroads of just about every human activity worth snooping; banking, business big medium and small, healthcare. Criminals both notable and otherwise post their exploits and those posts find their way routed to our n+1 powered, humming homes away from home. Confessions vary from the moronic - as a videotaped confession with a stolen camera surely was  - to the barbarous - as the flurry of terrorist attack and recruiting tapes surely are. ...

I am a data center guy. Layer 7 is the bees knees and all, but work doesnt really feel like work unless you can get electrocuted, yknow? So please watch the video above as Microsoft explains one of their first POC's for their DC cubes and share in the excitement with me. 2009 was a big year for modular data centers, and so the above video of Patrick Yantz (former Microsoft DSS Smarty Pants, c/o Hanselminutes on 9) is a bit on the older side. The industry as a whole hasn't caught up with this technology yet; we are still at the very beginning of the curve here. There is a lot of Business Nerd reasons for this - my intuition tells me that adoption will be in bursts driven largely by regulation not necessarily *preventing* the building of new DC's but slowing it down and uneasiness about long term demand paying off capitol outlays with whole DC buildouts - for the time being its still a very elite market, as most Normal folks will still simply lease and muscle DC provide...