By Ken Oestreich (Egenera)

Last week I attended Gartner's annual Data Center Conference in Las Vegas. Four days packed with presentations and networking (of the social kind). Lots of talk about cloud computing, IT operations, virtualization and more.

Surprisingly a number of sessions directly referenced compute Fabrics -- including "The Future of Server Platforms" (Andy Butler), "Blade Servers and Fabrics - Evolution or Revolution" (Jeff Hewitt), and "Integrated Infrastructure Strengths and Challenges" (Paquet, Dawson, Haight, Zaffros). All very substantive analyses of what fabrics _are_... but very little discussion of why they're _important_. In fact, Compute fabrics might just be the next big thing after OS virtualization. [..]