To put it into perspective, George W. Bush was still president, Barack Obama was still a little known U.S. Senator from Illinois, Mitt Romney had not yet delivered a keynote at the 7x24Exchange, gas was still under $2 per gallon, the economy was humming along, and no one had ever hear the acronym PIGS nations. So the world has changed.

To put it into greater perspective, we hadn’t yet faced weather events like Hurricane Irene and the tsunami in Japan that would teach us the limits of our ability to stay on line 24/7.

Facilities people, of course, knew about the Uptime Institute, but not 451 Research. The Green Grid was just in its infancy and had yet to propose DCIE. ASHRAE’s TC9.9 committee was active but had yet to develop the recommendations that would dramatically change allowable temperatures in data centers.

It would be more than two years before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency would launch Energy Star; DatacenterDynamics, of course, has been providing good content to the U.S. market, for this entire period but introduced their census only more recently.

Google and a few others had employed containers in its facilities, but the term modular wasn’t in common use yet. And the cloud was still a bit of ephemera as we all focused on virtualization.

Such was the environment when we launched Mission Critical, and the industry and the world have both changed quite a bit.

In fact, the industry and its players have changed quite a bit in just a few years. The challenge though—continuous uptime—remains unchanged, which masks the remarkable progress the industry has made in meeting organization demands, government regulations, and the power and cooling needs of larger, denser, and ever-more critical facilities.

To get a sense of the progress, the industry has made please take a look at our inaugural Winter 2007 edition, which will also give you some idea how we have evolved to meet our readers’ changing needs.

Thanks for reading.