I’m starting day two of the Data Center Summit at Interop, back-to-back with user group events in New York and Boston this week. The first day was a very interesting set of topics:

• Steve Shah of Risingedge presented a session on the “State of the cage.” This fascinating presentation looked at the evolution from mainframes to clustered computers, and from local procedure calls to intra-data-center delays.
• A panel of folks including Michael Baum (CEO of Splunk), James Sayles (CCO of Ecora) and Michael Weider (CTO of IBM’s recently-acquired Watchfire) discussed issues of compliance and privacy in data centers.
• John Carton, formerly at Accenture and now the Senior Director of Web Services at Nature’s Bounty, presented a model for thinking about disaster recovery in data centers.

There was lots to learn from the sessions. Steve pointed out that with the adoption of service-oriented architectures, back-end procedure calls that used to take microseconds now take milliseconds, and that virtualization will make this worse since developers don’t know whether an often-reached machine is local or remote. Michael observed that compliance, which tells people to keep everything, conflicts with privacy, which says that more data makes a breach more risky. And John suggested that companies need to evaluate not only availability, but also how much data they can afford to lose, when setting recovery policies for data centers.

Today’s tracks look at the range of data center models (from on-demand to full colocation with a content delivery network); the issues of power, cooling, and efficiency in greening modern data centers; and automating changes in within data center environments.

A quick sidenote: Our San Diego headquarters was a busy place this week, with the wildfires consuming a huge swath of the Southwest. While many of our employees were evacuated, nobody was hurt; and with offices in Boston and Montreal, Canada, we were able to handle order shipments and provide continuous support to our customers worldwide despite the crisis. Thanks to everyone involved in keeping things running despite the crisis.