At the Cloud Summit at Interop in NYC, Lew Moorman the CSO of Rackspace said that in 5-10 years the cloud security issues will go away!! Who plans 5-10 years ahead?

Sesh Murphy, VP Infrastructure Services Architecture at IBM discussed the idea of a cloud computing operator. The IT organization owns the infrastructure but a company such as IBM manages it. This seems like a compromise between private cloud computing and managed services.

Colin Hostert, CIO at Grooveshark.com commented that cloud providers vary widely in terms of their interest in negotiating terms and conditions. He used Akamai as an example of a cloud provider which is flexible and Amazon as an example of a cloud provider which is less flexible.

The take away for me was two fold. One, that security and confidentiality will be a big issue for the forseeable future. The second is that some vendors still say things like "sometime in the future this will not be an issue, so you should take more risks now".

Colin Hostert, CIO at Grooveshark stated that they didn’t do a thorough analysis before choosing a public cloud computing provider. Instead, they used more of a trial and error approach. Dominic Preuss of FiLife added that they are a relatively new company and didn’t have time to analyze how to deploy IT, they went right to using public cloud providers.

Back to the future – At the Interop conference Manish Muthal of LSI is suggesting that we return to a flat Layer 2 LAN in the data center.

At the Breakthrough Network Technologies session Jim moderated Wednesday which I spoke at (thanks again for the invitation, Jim!), I noticed an interesting commonality across a number of us on the panel, based on a good question from someone in the audience. The advent of Linux-on-Intel for networking makes innovation more possible than ever before. Unless you're building a router for the core of the Internet, the x86 architecture has plenty of horsepower for networking applications. This lowers costs for customers versus having to pay up for proprietary hardware R&D. Building on top of Linux and open source means that start-ups can begin from a much higher base, and take less time and money to deliver innovation to the market. Besides the obivous opportunity and lower costs for we start-up vendors, for enterprise customers it means that the value (and associated lock-in) of going with only large vendors for your networking purchases is lower than it's been in over a decade.

Finished up Exhibiting at Web2.0 ... most buzz and momentum came from talking to media agencies, PR firms, SM Consultancies about CrowdCampaign and how it can be applied for brands. Fun time, working a booth by your lonesome is challenging, but had a lotta fun doing it to. http://crowdcampaign.com for any readers who care to have a look see

At Interop in NYC John Curran the CEO of ARIN is making the case that the industry needs to migrate to IPv6 in 2010. Is this just more ‘Chicken Little’? I doubt it.