My friend Chris Collins of DatacenterDynamics has made me an offer I can't refuse. He absolutely insists that he wants to give 15 passes to the group's July 17th  San Francisco  to Mission Critical readers (end users and consultants should use the MCMAG code when registering. In return for this small favor he wants only that I recruit people to join his gang in the Facebook game Mafia Wars.

I've encountered literally dozens of professionals who playing this game, and it gets pretty competitive. Games like this, and the number of participants involved, demonstrate how thoroughly social media has begun to infiltrate our lives. What's more, the number of participants joining every day suggests that somebody at Facebook must be very busy supporting the virtual carnage.

So I have no doubt that Chris used some virtual muscle to bring Facebook’s Director of Site Operations Tom Furlong to DatacenterDynamics' San Francisco event to be on a panel with Jon Haas, Eco-Technologies Initiative Manager at Intel and Director of The Green Grid. These two and other panelists will discuss how data center operators use containers, modularity, high-density zones and mixed-use infrastructure to obtain protection for IT operations.

In another key presentation, Zahl Limbuwala, chairman of the British Computer Society’s Data Center Specialist Group will outline strategies to minimize a data center’s exposure to carbon tax by increasing energy efficiency. The UK cap-and-trade scheme, titled Carbon Reduction Commitment, will kick in April of 2010 and similar legislation is making its way through the U.S. Congress under the alias of Waxman-Markey bill. Limbuwala will explain how those in the data center space can best anticipate the new regulations and mitigate their impact on business. 

The San Francisco show is among DatacenterDynamics' largest and best attended. Just be careful of Chris and his computer. He may ask you to break into a data center for Facebook points.