I noticed a common theme at the string of computing conferences I’ve attended in the past couple of months: The future of the data center is going to be cloud computing, and resistance is futile.

I heard this from VMware Inc.’s President and Chief Executive Officer Diane Greene during her keynote at the JP Morgan Technology Conference in Boston in May, and the point was driven into the ground during the Enterprise 2.0 Conference there in June. I heard these predictions repeated during the annual Red Hat Summit and the USENIX 08 conferences, also held in Red Sox Nation last month.

Major league players in the data center space like VMware Inc. are putting their efforts into cloud computing because of predictions that it will eventually be the mainstream way information is handled and software vendors are starting to introduce products to manage cloud computing environments.

David Patterson, a professor of computer science at U.C. Berkeley, said during his keynote speech at USENIX that cloud computing is part of the data center evolution already under way.

“In addition to the processor evolution [from single-core to dual- and now quad-core processors], on a larger scale, there are a number of changes happening in the data center; flash memory is replacing mechanical disks, we have software as a service, and utility computing [a.k.a. cloud computing] is being used to outsource the data center,” Patterson said.

The advantages of cloud computing are clear, he said.

“With cloud computing, you put $0 down for your own data center, and pay as you go, and there is no penalty for scale up, which happens instantly. It allows fast scale up with no dead or idle CPUs, and no provisioning is required,” Patterson said.

This is especially appealing to data centers that have maxed out their power resources, but need to increase their infrastructure.

Though cloud computing is considered an immature technology, it really isn’t. The chief architect of the Xen project, Ian Pratt, said during his session at USENIX, called Xen and the Art if Virtualization, that the folks at Cambridge University who started the XenoServer project with him back in 1999 were architecting it under the cloud computing concept.

Though their ideas about what the cloud would look like differ from what we see today, the concept was similar: Develop a public infrastructure for wide-area distributed computing that can be used by people across the world.

“We originally thought there would be data centers all over the world, and clients would be able to choose a location, perhaps close to another IP address they wanted to interact with,” Pratt said. “The other difference is, we thought the machines would be owned by many different merchants, and there would be a broker acting as a third party recommending the different vendors, and those brokers would take a fee.”

Instead, we have companies like Amazon.com, Google and Salesforce.com offering the complete cloud computing environments , but Pratt expects this to change.

“I think we will see cloud computing move in the direction where it will become more open instead of all of the hardware, software and networking being located at and owned by a Google or Amazon.”

Today, most cloud computing providers host x86-compatible applications on virtualized servers, and most support only the Linux OS, according to Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. To keep costs low, many cloud providers use a Xen-based hypervisor. Charges for usage are usually based on CPU hours, gigabits consumed and gigabits per second transferred rather than on a monthly service fee.

Specifically, Amazon charges 10 cents per compute hour used and 15 cents per gigabyte of storage. According to Forrester, that translates into about $70 to $150 per month for a fully utilized Amazon server, versus the average $400 a month that it costs an enterprise to run a server.

The benefits aside, IT pros are apprehensive about taking their mission critical apps out of their secure data centers and putting them into something as translucent sounding as cloud computing. This fear was quite evident during the Enterprise 2.0 conference event called “An Evening in the Clouds.” A panel of IT pros sat and listed to Google, Amazon and Salesforce as they fluffed cloud computing, and then they voiced their many concerns.

Is it secure? Is it reliable? Does it perform better than my existing data center?

The answer from all the cloud computing providers was, of course, a resounding “yes.”

But not all applications are available in the cloud, so it isn’t for every company. The cloud computing environment also lacks government standards, which makes some users nervous.

“I wouldn’t suggest moving all of your apps over to the cloud today, but hopefully one day all will be right in the world,” said Jeff Keltner, the business development manager at Google Apps.

It’s not often we see malevolent, movie-type plots played out in IT departments, so check this out: Reuters reported that a computer systems administrator was sentenced to 30 months in prison Jan. 8 for trying to sabotage his company’s servers out of fear he was about to lose his job — the longest ever federal prison term for a criminal attempt to damage a computer system.

The former sysadmin was also ordered to pay $81,200 in restitution to his former employer, pharmacy benefit manager Medco Health Solutions Inc.

According to a report from the U.S. Department of Justice, Medco administered prescription benefit plans and maintained customer healthcare information on databases using an HP-Unix computer 2 system comprised of approximately 70 servers. The servers also included corporate financials, pharmacy maintenance tracking, web and pharmacy statistics reporting, and the employee payroll input.

As a system administrator, Lin had access to the Medco servers to perform maintenance and run applications.

The 51-year-old Unix pro admitted he modified computer codes and added code to create a “logic bomb” designed to wipe out servers on Medco’s network in October 2003, reports said.

At the time, Medco was restructuring and Lin reportedly feared he might be affected by layoffs.

A vindictive Lin modified and inserted code into pre-existing scripts on the Medco Servers designed to to delete nearly all of the information on those servers. The “Destructive Code” was designed to delete information including databases identifying subscribers, plan coverage, prescription administration, and billing data on his birthday, April 23, 2004.

But on October 6, 2003, Medco laid off four system administrators in the Unix group, but — get this — Lin was not one of them.

But he didn’t let a little good news get in the way of his plot. He left it in place, but the code failed to deploy as planned, so he edited it to go off on his birthday the following year, 2005.

Lucky for Medco, the unauthorized code was discovered by another computer administrator in January 2005.

All joking aside, this is really disturbing, not only because Lin took advantage of his power, but because clearly he didn’t consider all of Medco’s patients whose prescription information would be lost, and the potential harm he was doing not only to “the corporate machine” but to actual people.

Reports show that employee misconduct and unintentional actions like errors and omissions are the greatest cause of data security breaches, so I hope companies like Medco do some serious screenings for criminal minds before hiring people who will have access to our personal data.

I’m writing a story right now based on a study by the Aperture Research Institute showing the majority of data center managers have poor configuration management, and they don’t trust their infrastructure management tools.

The poll shows less than a third of data center managers are implementing ITIL; 30% are working on introducing ITIL initiatives and 9% are making plans to implement ITIL. Then there were the 20% who said they were merely investigating ITIL and 12% confessed they were not familiar with it at all.

Where do you stand with ITIL adoption?

BladeLogic has virtualization management software

The Lexington, Mass.-based company last week released BladeLogic Virtualization Manager, a systems management application focused on virtual machines (VMs). The new software works with VMware ESX and has a single interface to handle provisioning, deleting and managing of VMs.

RLE Technologies releases data center monitoring equipment

RLE’s new Falcon F110 is a data center monitoring system that allows for 11 different points where thresholds for temperature, humidity, and water leaks can be detected. When the limits are breached, the system can automatically notify the necessary people through email or messaging alerts. The F110 is the first of six products that RLE plans to release by the end of July.

Opsware updates online security and compliance subscription service

Opsware Inc., a data center automation software company, has updated its online subscription service, called The Opsware Network, for data center compliance and security. The company says the upgraded software has more than 2,000 new compliance and security checks to help meet regulations such as HIPAA and Sarbanes Oxley (SOX), as well as online community forums and access to additional downloadable content.

21st Century Software updates mainframe DR software; adds Unix DR software to the mix

21st Century Software has upgraded its DR/VFI data recovery and backup software for the mainframe, as well as announcing a new version for Unix systems. The mainframe product has new features such as the ability to now simulate a disaster recovery event before going offsite to perform testing. The Unix version is focused on backing up and restoring critical files and applications.