I just read an article about the inexorable march to a future filled with driverless cars. Based on past history, things seem to be moving forward as one might expect. Naturally, a lot of folks are excited, but I think this whole driverless movement raises some questions that might be overlooked in the standards development process.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, you know that you can’t swing a dead cat nowadays without hitting someone talking about the “edge.” One could make a serious argument the edge has supplanted the cloud as the IT topic that everyone talks about but doesn’t agree on a shared definition.

We are all familiar with the schism between hype and reality. For example, your favorite baseball team signs a hyped prospect who scouts are projecting will be “the next Mays,” but unfortunately, he winds up hitting more like Shirley Mays than Willie Mays and is never heard from again.

The United States government employs more than 2 million non-military personnel. That’s roughly the population of New Mexico. If you’re saying, “Wow, that’s a lot of folks,” you’d be right.

If Darwin were writing about data centers, he’d say that the abodes of compute and storage are going through a phase of rapid evolution, and it’s this evolution that is driving the massive degree of projected growth in data centers over the coming years.