For those of us in the IT business, we occasionally encounter a fundamental new enabling technology that forces us to reconsider some of our long-held notions around the way things work. I'd put server and desktop virtualization into that category, as well as the ubiquitous web. If you're a storage person, flash has that potential as well. If backup is your thing, the combination of dedupe and low-cost disks has changed how you think about things. In this post, I'd like to start to introduce a technology concept that — yes — has the potential to change a great deal of how we think about IT at scale. And, yes, this is going to be a long post … Context Today, Pat Gelsinger did an important event with industry analysts. You can see his materials and webcast here . In addition, I wanted to offer up my views on this topic as well. I'll be using his slide deck as a reference point