Video: Even though much of the focus is on servers, chips and cooling, storage definitely plays into the green datacenter big picture. “The problem with storage is that it keeps increasing,” says Hitachi Data Systems CTO Hu Yoshida in this interview. “Pretty soon, the majority of equipment in the datacenter will be storage.” It’s more energy-efficient than servers, but there are storage tiers where the data is not active and could be powered down. “I’m not particularly a fan of the green hype, I’d rather talk about efficiencies and utilization,” Yoshida says. Related: Storage grows greener, and InfoClipz on green technology. New to our site: Building out from its core desktop franchise and into online advertising, search, and even consumer electronics, Microsoft reinvents itself once again. And Wall Street is eager to see Microsoft break out, Bill Snyder writes in this Tech’s bottom line post. “Microsoft is moving onto Google’s turf. But it’s obviously far behind, and will remain so for quite a while. Investors understand that this is not a zero sum game. Successful companies don’t need to destroy their competitors. They simply need to make money. And both of them do — truckloads of it. So forget all that fashionable nattering about The Art of War, and focus on the bottom line.” Open source: Putting his money where his mouth is and saying he’ll wager a brand new Loonie on it, Savio Rodrigues bets that Microsoft is going to start allowing user contributions to .Net 3.5 within the next year. “Then we’ll see a Microsoft-led OSS project around the .NET runtime within the next 2 years. Microsoft will likely create a pseudo-GPL license (which isn’t the GPL) for this purpose,” he predicts in Microsoft is taking its lead from OpenJDK. “Offering the ‘allusion’ of allowing multiple distributions, based on the original Microsoft code, is a natural progression.” Quoteworthy: Services are indeed important, however the understanding, management, and use of data is something that needs to be the foundation of your SOA, as with any architecture. As I always say, you need a semantic or data-level understanding of your problem domain, then services, then processes. Truth-be-told many neglect the data, and data connectivity, when designing and building their SOA. This mistake typically causes project failure, or even worse ineffective SOAs that really just add to the complexity of the core architecture. That’s not good. — David Linthicum, SOA needs data. Data needs SOA. Now repeat.