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The move to virturalization leaves no stone left unturned. It touched the public network via EC2 (and now a host of hosts) it formed the Cloud and fused a new generation of the Internet. Service orientated also hits the data centers and this means things like switches, servers, and disk.

At the core of the movement of virtualization movement is freedom of the physical environment. Optimize hardware performance and set the workload free. In the process of doing this, a promise of cost savings has set a off a storm in re-factoring the data center.

This is the first in a series of posts taking a look at areas of the data center and how an openness strategy become a driver for winning customers by bringing costs down.

The first peek at Apple's new data center stoked much of the interest in our poll last week. We asked: "Why is Apple building a massive, $1 billion data center?" A total of 1,456 people responded.

This week is the RSA Conference, the largest security conference in the world. A major topic for discussion will focus on cloud computing security.

In last week's poll, we asked if one company will come to dominate cloud computing. We had 115 responses.

Today we posted about the massive data center that Apple is building in Maiden, NC. We know so little about what Apple plans to do with the 500,000 square foot data center. So, we want to ask you: Why is Apple building a massive, 1$ billion data center?

A first peek at Apple's new data center in Maiden, North Carolina, shows a massive complex that demonstrates the huge commitment Apple may be making to cloud computing.

According to Data Center Knowledge, the $1 billion data center is 500,000 square feet in size, nearly five times the size of Apple's 100,000 square foot facility in Newark, New Jersey.

The data center is considered a major part of Apple's cloud computing roll out.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) just gave Google the clearance to buy and sell energy in bulk. While it's interesting to speculate if Google wants to sell energy to consumers, the company has already declared that it has no plans to sell energy to consumers or to speculate in energy markets. Instead, Google says that it wanted this authorization from FERC in order to manage its own energy supplies better.

Google is giving a small town in Oregon $100,000 for free Wi-Fi. It's a town called The Dalles - a community with an interesting significance for Google.

The Dalles is a city of 12,000 people along the Columbia River, about 80 miles east of Portland. Google owns a massive data center there. It's a key Google operation, that's powered by the cheap hydroelectricity that comes from a dam on the Columbia. Twin cooling towers stand four-stories high, keeping the servers from overheating as they continually crunch data and serve it back to millions of people online.

This data center in The Dalles is what helps make Google's cloud computing capabilities a reality. Sure, it's connected to data centers around the world. But this one has special significance, In some ways, it symbolizes the emergence of the cloud computing era.

In this short analysis, we take a snapshot of a handful of key American technology leaders and what they stand to gain from virtualization. We believe that this trend is becoming a building block for dynamic infrastructure deployments for the enterprise and wanted to check in with some of our favorite technology brands to see what they are doing to grow the space.

Instead of looking at the virtualization software vendors themselves, we'll look at what drives the current virtualization momentum of companies like Intel, Cisco, and IBM that are already entrenched in the data center .

One of the fun things about being a leader in IT is the opportunity to see new technology and explain it to others for the first time. We love to see people's eyes get big and excited when some new wizardry is introduced and we're the first one to explain it.

In the simplest terms, a key outcome of virtualization that the virtual engine software layer divides either hardware or software into more pieces than originally existed. Instead of one operating system running, the same hardware can run several concurrently. For example, these can even be of different flavors such as Linux and Windows running on the same Intel hardware. Where it gets interesting is that each additional system running doesn't divide computing power in half, like you might expect. Instead, an overall gain in system utilization is found in this approach. This "unused" power frees computing resources without the need to procure new hardware.

You probably know Zoho as a SaaS company with enterprise collaboration and productivity tools. What you might not know is that they also offer on-premise deployments for companies with more than 10,000 employees. While this has been an important option for large enterprises not ready for the cloud, its limitation has always been the hardware requirements that went along with it. Starting today, that limitation disappears via partnership with VMware to get Zoho's apps running on the vSphere "private cloud" behind the firewall.

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, I asked all of the vendors, "SaaS or on-premise?" The assumption, because this conference was all about modern 2.0 stuff, was that everyone would say, "SaaS, of course."

Wrong. At least 50% of the vendors were deploying primarily on premise. Even some of the pure SaaS crowd would admit to an occasional on-premise deployment. Anecdotally, even some of those who say they are pure SaaS will deploy on premise quietly. Why are enterprise customers telling vendors that they want on-premise deployment?

According to a recent post from Data Center Knowledge, Apple is rumored to be planning a massive server facility costing as much as $1 billion.

Both North Carolina and Virginia have or are hurrying to instate tax incentives for projects such as this one, which will cost around twice as much as what Google or Microsoft would typically invest in a data center.

The technology landscape is shifting. With the rise of cloud computing, there has been a renewed focus on what's happening in the datacenter. But it's not just consumer-grade web apps that are driving this shift - enterprises, too, are looking to virtualize their services and move applications off the desktop in order to better manage client computers and maintain data security.

Recently, HP and research firm IDC took a look at some of the biggest trends they're seeing in the datacenter. These five hot new trends are having a big impact on computing today and the future of the cloud. But which ones are most important?