We are shifting their IT resources, we are modernizing them, and even building new ones -- clearly, the data center is here to stay I was 19 years old and sitting in my 200-level computer science class when I first heard about the “death of the data center.” Or, at that time, how minicomputers and the emerging presence of this thing called a microcomputer (what we now call a PC), where going to eliminate the need for centers that contain computing resources, my professor stated.More recently, with the emerging interest in cloud computing, there has been a renewed call for the demise of data centers as we shift to a more public cloud-oriented or utility computing model.I did not buy it then, and I’m not buying now. Indeed, while the data centers are changing significantly around the use of cloud computing, I suspect that we’ll have many new data centers in the near term, before data centers actually normalized. If you don’t believe me, just look around you. Facebook just announced that it will build its own new data center in Oregon that appears to be the size of a blimp hanger. IBM is looking to build out its cloud presence within its new data center in North Carolina.Moreover, Amazon.com is rapidly expanding its data center presence, as is Google, and other larger cloud computing providers. This is so common these days that you rarely hear news reports about new and expanding data centers.The pattern here is not that the data center will go away, but that they will shift and modernize over the next five years or so. While the traditional enterprise data center will lose some processing and data to public cloud computing providers, most of the shift will be moving to more effective and efficient computing models, using virtualization and other concepts systemic to cloud computing, whether public or private. At some point there will be some normalization of data centers, but we’re going to see rapid growth and change over the next few years. As we get better at cloud computing, the potential is to do much more with much less. I just don’t think we’ll be seeing that for a while.This article, “The death of the data center has been greatly exaggerated — again,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more from David Linthicum’s Cloud Computing blog and follow the latest develoopments in cloud computing at InfoWorld.com. IaaS