Little storage player 3Par Data is suddenly the envy of many, as it gets caught up in a massive bidding war between Dell and HP which have caused its share price to nearly double in a period of a week.

What gives? Well, virtualization and data centers, in a nutshell. As traditional enterprise spending slows, data centers continue to grow like mad, fueled by Internet services, social networking, and "cloud computing." It turns out that storage and virtualization services -- 3Par blends both of these -- are crucial to this high-growth area of computing.

After months of talking to smart people and taking notes, my latest notebook is filled. Usually what I do at this point is read back through the whole thing to see if there are any nuggets that I missed or forgot about.

Why not just dump it straight onto the Web? This is stuff that real people are saying in the real world. For your pleasure, here you go:

Interesting post on Themis Trading which I picked up via Zero Hedge on the trading investment in data centers. Equity firms spent $1.8B in data centers last year, wow!

The only problem with this trend? Programmers are getting gypped:

"According to our buddies at the Tabb Group, equity firms spent $1.8 billion last year on data centers; half of that total came from sell-side shops.  But even though they are spending tons of cash on the infrastructure, they are not exactly doling out the cash to  their programmers."

Source: Themis Trading.

 

LAS VEGAS -- I entered the show floor here at Interop, a long-running IT and networking technology conference, only to be bombarded with the words "cloud computing." For those of you who don't know what it is -- in addition to being the hottest technology marketing concept du jour -- it's the idea that you can tap into computing services and applications by "plugging into the cloud" of a service provider, rather than building the technology infrastructure yourself. This can work on an individual level or a corporate level. On a personal consumer level, I think a good example of cloud computing is Web photo services. We used to manage and store photos ourselves -- first in analog format and later in a digital mode. Increasingly, consumers are turning to a managed photo service where they store photos on a company's servers, to access and manage as they please. On a corporate level, the same thing is happening: companies are increasingly outsourcing technology and IT infrastructure to the "cloud" -- that is, a network that they can connect to remotely.