Speaking recently at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando, NYC Professor Clay Shirky warned CIOs that time’s a wasting. He said social media has democratized access to information, with people forming networks and sharing information wherever and whenever.

“The change brought about by social media for business is like when the PC came to the enterprise in the 1990s,” Shirky told the group “The PC came to the enterprise because the accountants hated the mainframe guys.” And road warriors demanded that laptops be integrated into corporate networks. In the 1990s, email joined corporate business culture when employees began putting their AOL addresses on their business cards.

That same sort of bottom-up adoption is now happening with social media. “Social media is being dragged into the business environment right now,” said Shirky, who also is an Internet consultant and author. “It will fall to the IT department — like it always does — to render these social threats and opportunities into something strategic.”

“The IT industry is already energy-neutral in terms of its consumption and savings, but there is still no credible scenario for safely managing the global production and disposal of literally billions of personal computers, mobile phones and other electronic devices,” writes David Moschella, research director for CSC’s Leading Edge Forum.

Writing in Computerworld, he says the reasons for focusing on IT energy conservation are obvious, ranging from global warming and the popularity of new gear that saves energy, to the difficulty of extracting toxic substances from retired electronic products and the public’s ignorance of the problem. “Many people simply don’t realize there is anything wrong with throwing out old IT products in their everyday bagged trash,” he writes.

“For these reasons, much of the IT community has turned a blind eye toward some truly appalling global practices and conditions, with the developing world too often used as an e-waste dumping ground, often harming the poorest of nations and people,” he contends. “This problem is only getting worse, as the number of devices built, sold and thrown away rapidly increases.”

“This should be the number one green IT priority for the next few years,” Moschella continues. “Too much time has been wasted already.”

No screws or “vanity plastic” on Facebook servers.

Facebook’s big data center in Prineville is pretty much an open book. The company is literally open-sourcing its data center and server designs, showing how the social-networking giant is stripping IT gear to bare essentials, with the goal of having a PUE – the industry-standard measure of energy efficiency in data centers – as low as possible.

At this point, the ratings for Facebook’s Prineville is well under the industry average of 1.5 PUE.

It’ll be interesting to see how the major vendors of IT gear react to the Facebook approach. Take servers, as an example. Facebook – in keeping with its barebones approach – strips its servers of any plastic casing and even unnecessary screws. The result is a server chassis with 22 percent fewer materials, no expansion slots, and weighing six pounds less than the comparable mass-market server.

Facebook also arranges racks as triplets for easier deployment and swapping, and has simplified its servers’ power supplies to achieve efficiency of greater than 94 percent.

Of course this approach to server architecture eliminates the manufacturer’s plastic skin along with any trace of product branding. “The upshot here is that many IT buyers will look at Facebook designs and incorporate them into what they do,” observes Larry Dignan at ZDNet. “It’s highly likely that technology vendors will have to respond.”

The census, conducted by DatacenterDynamics, is the largest comparative study of data center operators and users, with 5,400 interviews conducted in 70 countries in June and July of this year. The census focused on 22 key markets worldwide, and found outsourcing to be prevalent across all markets.

Variation was wide, however, according to geographic region. India, for example, outsources 30 percent of its racks, and China 28 percent, while the Middle East is lowest at only 3 percent.

“It is evident that outsourcing fulfills different roles in the evolution of markets; as an entry point for organizations which have not yet evolved the capacity requirement to operate their own environments, or as an exit point in developed markets where the pace of increased IT requirements has exceeded in-house capacity,” explains Nick Parfitt, a DatacenterDynamics researcher.

Click here to read the entire report.

Architectural rendering of proposed data center in Minnetonka.

Are data centers going to be popping up in disguise in upscale residential neighborhoods? That’s a possibility raised by a proposed facility in Minnetonka, Minnesota, according to Data Center Knowledge.

FiberPop, a startup intent on building a chain of “community-based data centers,” is planning a $30 million, 36,000-square-foot facility in an area zoned for luxury homes in the Minnesota city. The facility is designed to have mansion-style sloped rooflines, dormers, stone-facade walls and high-end landscaping. The actual data hall is on the lower level, along with 60 underground parking spaces while FiberPop offices are on the mansion’s main level.

“We wanted it to fit into the neighborhood,” says FiberPop president Jim Louks of his plan to integrate the data center into the residential area. “I don’t know if it’s a mansion. It’s a commercial building with an upscale look to it.”

“Granted there will be plenty of more cloud FUD and hype, cloud washing and cleaning going around,” he writes in Data Center Journal. “However, 2012 and beyond will also find organizations realizing where and how to use different types of clouds — public, private, hybrid — to meet various needs, from SaaS and AaaS to PaaS to IaaS and other variations of XaaS.”

“Part of the clarification will be that there are many different types of cloud architectures, products, stacks, solutions, services and products to address various needs,” he continues. “Another part will be discussion of what needs to be added to clouds to make them more viable for both new as well as old or existing applications. This means organizations will determine what they need to do to move their existing applications to some form of a cloud model while understanding how clouds coexist and complement what they are currently doing.”

If you’re wrestling with how a Cloud solution to meet your application requirements, be sure to talk with us at EasyStreet!

“Unfortunately, the information technology infrastructure at many large companies only makes this challenge more difficult, writes renowned technology observer Andrew McAfee in the Harvard Business Review. “Their technology environments actually impede their ability to sense change and respond quickly. While there is no simple fix for this problem, help is at hand in the form of cloud computing, a new suite of digital tools and approaches.

“Cloud computing is a sharp departure from the status quo,” McAfee goes on. “Today most companies own their software and hardware and keep them ‘on premise’ in data centers and other specialized facilities. With cloud computing, in contrast, companies lease their digital assets, and their employees don’t know the location of the computers, data centers, applications, and databases that they’re using. To advocates of cloud computing, that’s the whole point. Customers don’t have to concern themselves with details; they just rent what they need from the cloud.”

“Colocation offers scalability,” says Caroline Brelsford, head of national accounts with Houston-based CyrusOne. “If an enterprise grows quickly, the storage and power will be there. If it grows more slowly than anticipated, the enterprise hasn’t spent money on facilities that are underused. That means you’re not trying to build five or 10 years out without a crystal ball.”

(Good thing for EasyStreet customers – we offer both cloud AND colocation services. Or even an integration of the two.)

We find many of our customers (old and new) are taking advantage of the integrated/hybrid IT solutions EasyStreet can design and build for them. These custom designs can combine a number of components, including Private Cloud, Multi-Tenant Cloud or colocation services, to create the best solution based on that particular customer’s needs. (Yes, the word “solution” is overused, but I can’t think of a better one to use in this case.) With our fast point-to-point or Internet connectivity options, some part of the infrastructure can even be kept on customer premises while the rest resides at EasyStreet. (This is the “fine-grained manner” David was writing about.)

Click here to read all four of David Linthicum’s Cloud computing myths.

Better yet, click here to request a quotation from EasyStreet to design a custom Cloud solution for your business.

Not surprisingly, the most popular skill these executives want is programming and application development, including web development and upgrading internal systems. Just over 60 percent will seek these skills, up significantly from the 44 percent who sought these same skills in the 2010 survey.

Expanded project-management skills also are high on the list, especially the ability to identify users’ needs and translate them into effective solutions that the IT team can develop. Other skills the executives mentioned included technical support and business intelligence.

Of course cloud computing and virtualization are prompting a growing number of IT staff openings in networking, VMware, data center operations and integration, according to the executives polled.