EE Times' top ten cloud stories in 2011

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The most popular cloud computing stories of 2011 were about big vendors jumping into or kicking the tires on this emerging space and engineers coming to grips with the technologies involved. Data center design news also grabbed some eyeballs while standards captured some attention.

I give a story on the IEEE kicking off two standards efforts in cloud computing an honorable mention at #10. It was actually about 12 in the reader rankings but I'm putting it on the list due to its importance.

Since early 2009, computer scientists have been calling for cloud standards. The Open Cloud Manifesto came out of the work of an ad hoc group trying to come to grips with the issues in 2009. Even the Obama Administration supported a commission that reported in 2011 on the need for public and private collaboration on cloud standards

Many of the top ten cloud stories were design articles and technical papers helping engineers understand the underlying technology.

A series of four tutorials on the future of cloud computing based on a book by Terrence Lillard was the most popular of these, coming in fifth place. Susan Rambo, managing editor of our sister publication Embedded Systems Design, was close behind at number six with an article on emerging machine-to-machine (M2M) standards as part of a cloud discussion group she spawned this year.

A series of articles on cloud security from a book by Vic (J.R.) Winkler came in seventh. And a primer on Web services for M2M applications by Joel Young, CTO of Digi International, ranked ninth.

Third on the list was a news story about the head of Microsoft's data center group calling for cloud-friendly flash chips and server SoCs at an LSI Corp. event in November. Dileep Bhandarkar gave a similar speech at a Linley Group event in January.

Interestingly, the big story in April on Facebook opening up its data center designs on everything from server power supplies and motherboards to air conditioning techniques did not rank high with readers. Facebook's Open Compute Project staged an update of its work in October, bringing in heavy hitting speakers including serial entrepreneur Andy Bechtolsheim—but again got relatively few clicks.

At the end of the year, we published on our paid content EE Times Confidential site a wrap up on what we see as the big opportunities and challenges ahead in data center design.