On the Road in Las Vegas and Baltimore

The Station isn’t exactly stationary this week. We’ve been on the road in Las Vegas at the Gartner Data Center 2007 Conference at the immense MGM Grand. We’ve broken a couple of news stories (“Novell Ships First Real-Time SUSE Linux” and “Sun, IBM Prep OpenSolaris for z System Mainframes”) and heard one or two good analyst talks. We’ll bring some of that valuable analysis to you soon.

But although the conference was packed to capacity — and attendees undoubtedly learned a lot of good new information — overall it wasn’t a real newsy event.

The scene has shifted to Baltimore, a place The Station has never visited but has always admired from afar — thanks to people like Barry Levinson (“Diner”), Brooks Robinson, and Johnny Unitas. The Station was asked by Emerson Network Power, which owns Liebert, among other highly respected business units, to moderate a panel discussion on how to save both money and power in data centers at its annual conference.

Reps from Emerson, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Dell and VMware will be on the panel. That is set for today at 1 p.m. Eastern at the Convention Center; about 1,200 people are expected to listen in. eWEEK’s own Scott Ferguson will also eavesdrop and maybe even file a report if anything worthwhile is said. We suspect, however, that there will be.

It used to be that print and online journalists could just do their research, talk to a couple of key sources, add their secret-sauce knowledge (if any), then write and file the story before moving on to the next assignment. Often this can be accomplished while still in pajamas at home.

It’s not that simple anymore. More and more of us are being asked to get out of our house duds, dress in business attire, show our faces (not always the best idea), and actually talk in public about what we have uncovered in the act of doing our daily research and reporting.

No problem with that at The Station. We can talk and write — at the same time, if asked. Now whether we make any sense … that’s another story.