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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 .

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?