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The next five years or so will spell big trouble for data centers. About 46 percent of more than 150 IT professionals and executives surveyed earlier this year by the Business Performance Management Forum said they're running out of space, power and cooling infrastructure for their data centers. In the years leading up to 2011, data center operations will slam to a halt at more than 90 percent of all companies because of power failure and limits on the availability of power, according to a study by AFCOM.

IBM released an on-demand, cloud-based suite of products targeting small and medium-sized businesses looking to offload security, e-mail continuity and archiving services. The Express Advantage product line -- which is meant to offload some of the more data-intensive processes an IT department has to handle -- is an offsite data backup and recovery service as well as an e-mail and archiving service aimed at companies with small IT departments. The product is also integrated with IBM's Concierge customer support center.

IBM on Wednesday unveiled a new category of server designed specifically for cloud computing and Web 2.0 applications. The iDataPlex system builds upon IBM's blade server background and more than doubles the number of systems that can run in a single IBM rack. It also uses 40 percent less power while quintupling the amount of computing that can be done. The iDataPlex can be outfitted with a liquid-cooled wall to eliminate the need for air conditioning, and it uses industry-standard components including Linux and cluster-management technology xCat to reduce its cost.

Complexity in today's IT systems makes previous error prevention approaches for operators inefficient and costly. IT staffs are expensive to retain, and are increasingly hard to find. There is also insufficient information about what's going on in the context of an entire systems setup. Operators are using manual processes -- in reactive firefighting mode -- to maintain critical service levels. It simply takes too long to interpret and resolve IT failures and glitches. We now see 70-plus percent of the IT operations budget spent on labor costs.

Critics thought it was over the top when Amazon.com expanded from books into music in 1998. When the Web retailer let competitors start selling things alongside its own inventory in 2000, they said Amazon had gone nuts. In both cases, Amazon proved them wrong. Media sales now total in the billions each quarter, and third-party merchandise, more profitable for Amazon than its own wares, makes up nearly a third of everything sold through the site. Now, Amazon is making an even greater stretch -- selling storage, computing power and other behind-the-scenes data center services.

Critics thought it was over the top when Amazon.com expanded from books into music in 1998. When the Web retailer let competitors start selling things alongside its own inventory in 2000, they said Amazon had gone nuts. In both cases, Amazon proved them wrong. Media sales now total in the billions each quarter, and third-party merchandise, more profitable for Amazon than its own wares, makes up nearly a third of everything sold through the site. Now, Amazon is making an even greater stretch -- selling storage, computing power and other behind-the-scenes data center services.

Blink and you'll miss it. In the time it takes to bat your lashes, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange executes and clears 33 electronic trades. That velocity, a trade every 15 milliseconds, can leave anyone who relies solely on eyesight blind to what's happening in the markets. Once guided by hand signals, the Chicago exchanges have pushed their way into the forefront of global finance by mastering speed, routing deals for Connecticut-based hedge funds at a pace equal to Mach 500,000. They are now racing to accelerate trades, attract greater volumes and generate better profit margins.

Cisco Systems released a new data center switching technology designed to make it easier for IT network managers to create a centralized data storage center. The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series is part of Cisco's Data Center 3.0 vision, which reverses the previous client-server side architecture that many data centers were using. The move comes in response to the rising costs and complex network management issues that arose with these distributed networks. The Nexus series uses the Cisco Nexus Operating System to help IT managers better consolidate the software systems running their networks.

Touting its long history of supercomputing and grid computing expertise and citing the "extreme scale" potential of highly distributed processing, IBM is unveiling a series of cloud computing offerings based on open standards and open source software. Called "Blue Cloud," a reference to IBM's "Big Blue" nickname, the initiative will help enterprises distribute computing across a "globally accessible fabric of resources" instead of merely on local machines or server farms, said the company.