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Last week as part of the HP ISS Tech Day I had a chance to talk to Bill Haggard, director of enterprise infrastructure for the Dallas Cowboys Football Club about why the Cowboys chose HP to power its data centers. It may not seem like a professional football team would need a data center, but consider this: in addition to powering all of the 665 point-of-sales (POS) terminals for concession stands and the 82 POS terminals for retail merchandise shops within the Dallas Cowboys Stadium, the Cowboys' data center must support all the merchandise shops across the country. The company owns several other subsidiary businesses as well, and the data center at the Cowboys Stadium is the primary location for all the businesses' IT infrastructure.

The number of available IPv4 addresses is expected to run out in less than a year, as we've reported before. The proliferation of mobile devices and sensors, all of which use IP addresses, is depleting the total number available. Organizations need to migrate to the newer IPv6 standard to avoid running out of these critical points in the network.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued a free 188 page report to help guide managers, network engineers, transition teams and others working on IPv6 deployments. The report explains IPv6, covers IPv6 security issues, explains how to deploy dual IPv4/IPv6 environments and more.

Ryan Lane, an operations engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote a blog post about how he is using OpenStack to build a cloud infrastructure for testing and development. OpenStack is the open-source initiative that provides an infrastructure for building cloud environments.

Lane wants an infrastructure that does not require operations to manage user accounts, virtual machines, DNS entries or IP addresses. Lane also wants an environment in which developers can add additional infrastructure without operations support. Sound to good to be true? Lane seems to have it all worked out.

Much has been written about the benefits of cloud computing. Cost savings are one of the biggest benefits cited, but how can you make sure you're actually maximizing your savings? Diversity analyst Ben Kepes has written a white paper for Rackspace called Moving your Infrastructure to the Cloud: How to Maximize Benefits and Avoid Pitfalls. This paper is a good introduction to the subject of cloud computing and would be of benefit to anyone making a decision about migrating to the cloud.

Refreshingly, the white paper is available in HTML instead of as a PDF and requires no email address or registration to view.

Forrester analyst James Staten has compiled his list of ten cloud computing (or, more specifically, infrastructure-as-a-service) predictions for 2011. Staten sees hosted private clouds and community clouds being increasingly important, cloud computing costs being driven down, and a widening gap between those that take advantage of cloud computing and those that don't. IaaS is one of the 15 technologies listed in the Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch_2011 To 2013 report released last month, and this blog post by Staten drills deeper into the subject.

Opscode, a cloud infrastructure automation company, announced today that it has closed an $11 million Series B round of funding. The round was led by Battery Ventures and brings the total raised for the company to $13.5 million.

Proceeds from the new funds will be used to expand the company's engineering staff, research initiatives, and sales and marketing efforts.

NorthScale is on the move. Hot off its recent accomplishment of winning several awards - including best in show at the 2010 Under the Radar event - the company announced a successful round of financing from the Mayfield Fund.

Its successful product release in March put the company on the map as a defining leader in the noSQL approach to data persistence. The company has already gained Zynga as a customer of its beta version of Memcached, and has announced its plans to provide elastic data infrastructure as an approach to scaling applications in the cloud.

Do you like getting paid?

Today, RackSpace Cloud announced a new cloud partner program designed to bring new business to reward partners for bringing hosting to the cloud offerings with the company.

Now with the Rackspace program program, resellers can receive direct rewards in the form of percentage points on the back-end and join in the financial benefits of cloud hosting.

If you're a software-as-a-service company you are probably thinking about how cloud computing can save you money and time. The same thing is true for departments in the enterprise that wants to spin up a new service for customers.

We had a chance to sit down with BlueLock, one of the leaders in cloud-based infrastructure providers. Their solutions range from quick provisioning using an online form, to becoming your infrastructure team for mission-critical applications. BlueLock represents a part of the trend in virtualization that not only extends physical servers, but allows companies to leverage infrastructure investments to meet the needs of application developers.

Portland, Oregon based startup Urban Airship demonstrated a beta service at today's Apple developers conference that will handle the heavy lifting for small iPhone app shops seeking to utilize the new push notification functionality and the ability to sell goods in-app instead of sending customers to Apple's store.

The service uses RESTful APIs and Open Source code libraries to handle "the tedious, annoying, difficult and troublesome parts of the development process" and offer outsourced scalability solutions.