A devastating assessment of the course of technology growth last Friday from technology analyst Forrester flies in the face of what competitive firms would consider "conventional wisdom," to say that before cloud computing truly commands the attention of enterprise network architects, a few other dramas currently in progress must play themselves out first.

At the center of one of these dramas is a player that officially exited the enterprise computing market in November 2010: Apple. The reason: Apple makes a tablet that CxOs really want. Many may not actually know how it integrates with their networks, but unlike most any technology purchase to date, they're willing to invest in it now and figure out the solutions down the road.

Cloud computing, it is often claimed, is a good way for companies to reduce their carbon footprint. The reality, as Tom Raftery explains on Greenmonk, is much more complicated than that.

In context, Raftery is writing about a pair of reports from the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and Verdantix. Raftery argues that "Cloud Computing – The IT Solution for the 21st Century" (PDF) and an addendum for France and the UK (PDF) are fundamentally flawed.

Here's a prediction for 2012 you can bank on: the world's data centers are going to be busy, just like they were in 2011. Emerson Network Power has put together an infographic on the State of the Data Center 2011.

According to the infographic (and its sources) daily tweets tripled, people will create 1.2 trillion GB of data and there are more than 509,000 data centers world-wide (PDF).

You'd think it would be an easy thing to market an all-in-one concept of a "cloud-in-a-box" - a package that gives enterprises everything they need to deploy and manage a private or hybrid cloud. Soon you discover that it's harder to define the box than to define the cloud, because it's the box that you'll inevitably be selling. And if it doesn't look like a cloud, you might find a competitor charging it with being false and misleading.

Last week, BMC Software brought forth the second generation of its Business Service Management (BSM) delivery model. Think of this as BMC's cloud box - the way it orchestrates a cloud deployment for a data center. What changes with this version of the box versus the previous one is that the planning and deployment phases are presented to customers as workflows, rather than do-it-yourself kits.

We've talked here before in ReadWriteWeb about the so-called "carrier cloud" concept being developed by Alcatel-Lucent. Think about the level of interconnectivity your enterprise data center would need to present voice and multimedia data to customers at carrier speed, while at the same time transferred to a cloud platform that's scalable and easily provisioned.

Last week, A-L (the successor to Bell Laboratories) announced its first 64-port 10-gigabit Ethernet (10GbE), or 6-port 40GbE switch, essentially the first switch of this genre manufactured specifically to support cloud-style data center configurations. The news comes on the heels of an independent analysis released Monday of the OmniSwitch 10K, the company's 10GbE switch released just last April - an analysis which (PDF available here) may have dropped jaws to the floor.

We haven't written much about Hatsize.com, a cloud automation-testing outfit that has been around since 2000 and is based in Calgary. Their goal is to make it easier for enterprises to do demos and set up test environments using VMs. Today they came out with a nice buyer's guide. (Free registration required.) While a bit self-serving, it still is worth taking a look at if you are considering using a cloud vendor to automate some of your own testing needs.

VirtualSharp Software announced today a new version of its automated Disaster Recovery solutions for private and public clouds called ReliableDR 3.0. What does this mean? Well, you have heard about backup in the cloud, this takes things to the next level, essentially making it easier to stage and orchestrate your recovery processes. It isn't just making copies of your data, but packaging the entire server and OS and everything you need to restart a downed machine in a matter of minutes, using virtualization technologies. Think of it as RaaS, or Recovery as a Service. (Yes, I know, another aaS app.)

The question among both cloud computing consumers and supercomputer clients alike has been when the distinction between the little cloud and the big iron would disappear. Apparently that boundary evaporated several months ago. In its twice-annual survey of big computer power, the University of Mannheim has reported that Amazon's EC2 Compute Cluster - the same one you and I can rent space and time on today - performs well enough to be ranked #42 among the world's Top 500 supercomputers.

How far down is #42? In terms of time, not far at all. When EC2 was but a gleam in Jeff Bezos' eye, Los Alamos National Laboratory's BlueGene/L was king. Now, the 212,992-core beast ranks #22. Roadrunner, the amazing hybrid made up of 122,400 of both IBM Power and AMD Opteron cores, sits in #11. Meanwhile, EC2 - whose makeup is a little of this and a little of that - has achieved #42 status with only 17,024 cores.

GoGrid became the second cloud services vendor to offer dedicated intramural connections across its network today. Amazon has been offering a somewhat similar service called Direct Connect since August. Called CloudLink, traffic is sent over a private line inside GoGrid's network, making it useful for disaster recovery and fast data replication uses.

Over the last several years, the cloud has brought a host of functionality to small and medium businesses that did not exist before. The ability to host and store data at the fraction of the cost than what was available before may prove to be a seminal shift in the history of how industries conduct digital business.

A company called Axcient wants to take it a step further. Axcient, which specializes in data backup and infrastructure for SMBs, is releasing a product today that it calls Cloud Continuity and its makes a big, bold claim: the end to business downtown, period. Axcient's approach to data backup and business computing certainly is unique in the industry, but can it really put an end to downtime?