The Gartner Data Center Conference kicked off this morning in Las Vegas. Despite the completely packed plane coming out here, Vegas seems quieter and not so crowded. The bartender at Wolfgang Puck’s Bistro told me they were looking forward to the 1800 people coming to this show to fill the hotel up. As we’ve noted, the economic crisis is impacting business travel all around.

22% of the attendees at Data Center come from the public sector and government, with 44% coming from very large enterprises of 20K+ employees.

During the Gartner IOM conference in June, some of the most interesting info coming out of it was the quick polls of the audience on a variety of infrastructure and operations management topics. What are enterprises doing? Where are they headed? What’s important to them? Here are some quick takes from the opening session:

1) What is the largest data center challenge that you currently face?

• Smaller Budgets: 21%
• Power & Cooling: 20%
• Dealing with the Rate of Technology Change: 15%
• Aligning Activities with the Business: 15%
• Modernizing Legacy Applications: 10%
• Lack of Data Center Space because of Equipment Spread: 9%
• How to Source IT Services: 5%
• How to Find and Retain Talent: 5%

Well, it’s taken almost a year to be “official”, but the National Bureau of Economic Research just announced that the US has been in a recession since December of 2007. It should come as a surprise to no one that dealing with smaller budgets is top of mind, even for the predominantly larger enterprises attending here.

2) What projects will receive the most funding in 2009?

• Virtualization/Consolidation: 31%
• Data Center Facilities – new builds: 17%
• IT Operations Process Improvement: 12%
• IT Modernization: 7%
• Green IT: 5%

Virtualization and (server) consolidation projects are clearly a priority for larger enterprises in 2009. What’s interesting here is the relatively very low priority of Green IT projects – in spite of the importance to attendees of getting power and cooling costs under control. Perhaps there’s a gap here between what’s often the hype of Green IT and practical considerations for data center managers when it comes to power and cooling management.

3) Where are you with server consolidation projects?

• No Plans: 3%
• Looking at it now and will start in next 2 years: 13%
• In process now: 58%
• Have already completed server consolidation project: 26%

Larger enterprises are consolidating servers with a quarter of attendees already having gone through the process at least once. And according to poll #2, this trend will definitely continue.

Read more: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/cc185712.aspx

Download now: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=CD057D9D-86B9-4E35-9733-7ACB0B2A3CA1&displaylang=en

Take a few moments and give yourself a security checkup. If you have any comments or feedback on the tool, feel free to leave them here on my blog—I’ll make sure the right people see it.

From the download page:

The MSAT employs a holistic approach to measuring your security posture by covering topics across people, process, and technology. Findings are coupled with prescriptive guidance and recommended mitigation efforts, including links to more information for additional industry guidance. These resources may assist you in keeping you aware of specific tools and methods that can help change the security posture of your IT environment.

There are two assessments that define the Microsoft Security Assessment Tool:

• Business Risk Profile Assessment
• Defense in Depth Assessment (UPDATED)

The questions identified in the survey portion of the tool and the associated answers are derived from commonly accepted best practices around security, both general and specific. The questions and the recommendations that the tool offers are based on standards such as ISO 17799 and NIST-800.x, as well as recommendations and prescriptive guidance from Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group and additional security resources valued in the industry.

After completing an Assessment, you will gain access to a detailed report of your results. You may also compare your results with those of your peers (by industry and company size), provided that you upload your results anonymously to the secure MSAT Web server. When you upload your data the application will simultaneously retrieve the most recent data available. To be able to provide this comparative data, we need customers such as you to upload their information. All information is kept strictly confidential and no personally identifiable information whatsoever will be sent.