sun microsystems

In February of 2009 I had a very unique event happen.  It was by far, one of the geekiest things I had ever done. I was still working at Sun and we had rebuilt the Data Center POD concepts into Second Life. We had created a Data Center Island that allowed anyone to walk into this virtual world and watch how the data center can be transformed from traditional power and cooling to the new modular, highly efficient configuration with PODs.  They could also interact with the PODs to see how hardware fit and things could move around.  A virtual-physical data center. That was geeky enough, but try this on for size. Greg Papadopolous (Sun's CTO & controller of over $2B in R&D funds) joined me for a live webecast directly from Second Life to Industry Analysts. They had created avatars for both of us that made us look much younger, more dignified (and skinnier) than we really were.