Yesterday I visited the Linux Event in San Francisco to catch up on what's new in  Linux and also how cloud computing is changing the Linux crowd. The interesting things for me were the  Ice Cubes(TM) that hardware vendors are now offering. [here]

Also interesting are how iDataPlex(TM) can acutaly generate cooling  rather than cosume and add to an already overgrown carbon footprint. [here]

 I think the main difference and visions of the vendors was obvious. Just walk into the cube solutions; nice and and neatly stacked with air conditioning rushing at you like a tornado just hit. You can  feel, hear, smell, touch and even taste the cooling rush and addtional carbon footprint. The benefit is to create remote datacenters on the fly and to spread the environmental impact accross multiple locations quickly.

The green side of System Z is hands down the best solution I've seen. Just run all enterprise SaaS apps on a single box and your good. Since cloud computing is becoming more mainstream most small-medium and enterprise business are now joining and understand the value of Utility Computing to meet critical SLA's for the core business processes.

 There was also a nice session to reimage a used desktop with Ubuntu which was kind of cool. The used boxes where then donated to school for education purposes.

Overall I think the session was good. Very light compared to Java One or Tivoli Pulse in Orlando this year. Is the applicaiton layer becoming more finer grained and optimized since the importance of the underlying operating system is becoming less and less important? Who knows maybe clouds do take affect on which conferences are heavly visited.