This week I am at EMC World in Orlando picking up a sense that cloud is the message, private cloud, public cloud, storage cloud, compute cloud. It’s a strong message that resonates with the CIO and the business as it holds the promise of computing on demand and maybe even the utility computing that we have been hearing about for decades.

This morning I heard Paul Maritz talk about VMWare and VSphere in particular, impressive, very impressive and a great vision of creating an Intel mainframe out of the huge compute, storage and network resources we have been investing in for years. A real hot topic for The Hot Aisle is energy efficiency and Paul spoke compellingly about the ability to migrate workload onto fewer or more compute cores as demand varies. He showed us a chart of the electrical demand moving with the demand curve so that we use most electricty at times of highly intense demand and start shutting down cores as the demand falls away.

I found myself wondering how the building management platforms we have today are going to manage this highly variable demand and how the tricky issue of balancing load across major M&E components is actually going to work in this brave new world. I think this is an area where we need a lot more systematic end-to-end thinking and perhaps a Data Center API that helps us poor oily rags in the bowels of the data center plant work with this new utility vision.

So VMWare, Microsoft, Oracle, EMC what about thinking systematically rather than in technology silos?