I'm too exhausted after spending the day at Intel's Day in the Cloud Event at its Jones Farm and Hawthorn Farm facilities to make much sense of what I saw and learned and to organize all the images and notes I took. You will have to settle for a summary and my promise to post the videos and photos I took and to provide more detailed information down the road.

Actually the day was so fast-paced, that I'm sure I didn't get everyone's name and title or the proper spellings of those names I did get. It's not often I'll admit to that. I'll have to wait for Intel to send the presentations to me so that I can confirm my notes I am going to report that Intel and its many partners opened my eyes as to the potential of the cloud. Rather than being barriers to cloud adoption, data security and availability seem to be reasons that companies of all sorts will eventually move to the cloud. In fact, it is possible too see a world where most computing takes place in a cloud, with users at all levels accessing data and applications as needed, even when the files are shared or different levels of access are granted different users.

It seems that companies like Intel, VMWare, Parallels, Dell, Citrix, Hytrust, EMC2, Oxygen Cloud, and others have invested significant time solving the cloud's shortcomings in ways that plug holes that have plagued data centers and data center operators almost from the beginning.

Intel talks about a system architecture that encompasses not only the servers, switches, and storage devices found in data centers but also the peripherals from which people more and more often access applications and data. These peripherals include laptops, tablets, and phones, of course, but eventually include POS devices, ATMs, and even BAS, as long as it utilizes a browser.

Naturally, of course, the technology will enable the data center servers to recognize the capabilities of the remote device, the security and bandwidth of the network it is operating on, and even the state of its battery as a preliminary step towards providing an optimized user experience. Why provide high-def video to a low-def unit when faster downloads would make for a better user experience?

In short, these cloud advocates believe they are on the road to providing optimized user experiences in a way that improves security, meets regulatory requirements, reduces energy use on both ends of the transaction, and lowers TCO for both private and public cloud consumers.

These implications for how we compute and the cost of computing, obviously, are huge. So, too, will be the implications for how data centers are designed, how they run, for the SLAs that they will provide.

I hope to explore some of these issues in future blog posts and to share more of my experiences at Intel in upcoming blog entries.