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It’s time to exhale: Our first Structure 08 conference, slated to be held on June 25th in San Francisco, is almost sold out. With a week to go we have just 25 tickets left, and I have to tell you that despite the long sleepless nights ahead, I’m pretty jazzed about the event.

Amongst ticket buyers, we’ve seen a lot of venture capitalists that are clearly looking at the infrastructure space with some interest, possibly for investments. Also attending will be a lot of people from large corporations as they try to make sense of this whole evolution. Despite how central this issue has become to my writing lately, the mix of people is surprising even to me.

And yes, I’m totally biased, but the line-up of speakers and panelists for the conference would give anyone a serious IQ turbo boost. I recently spent some one-on-one time with speakers such as Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris and Aster Data Systems’ Mayank Bawa, and was amazed by their depth of knowledge. Here’s a quick rundown of the keynotes, panels and workshops:

Keynotes: Werner Vogels (CTO, Amazon.com), Jim Crowe (CEO & President, Level 3 Communications), Greg Papadopoulous (CTO, Sun Microsystems)

Fireside Chats: Parker Harris (Co-founder, Salesforce.com), Dr. Mendel Rosenblum (Co-founder, VMware)

Mini-Notes: Debra Chrapaty (Microsoft), Dr. Larry Roberts (Founder, Anagran), Jonathan Yarmis (AMR Research), Zach Nelson (NetSuite), & Dr. Jonathan Koomey (Lawrence Berkeley National Labs) Drew Perkins (Co-Founder, Infinera)

Panels:

• Working the Clouds: NextGen Infrastructure for New Entrepreneurs
• The New New Stack: Re-examining the Internet Platform Chain
• The Race to the Next Database: Overclocking and Analytics Augment Your Data Layer
• Harnessing Explosive Growth: Infrastructure Strategies and Tactics
• Infrastructure On Demand: Should You Build Your Future on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)?
• Eyes Wide Shut: Why is the VC Community Keeping Its Wallet Shut to Infrastructure?

Workshops:

• Google App Engine: Learn how to harness the power of Google’s global infrastructure for your idea
• Microsoft Data Center Secrets: Get insights from Microsoft’s infrastructure team on building out large deployments.
• Fenwick & West Venture Capital and Seed Financing: Interact with entrepreneurs and prominent angels focused on raising money for infrastructure ideas.

I want to take a moment to thank our media partners, who have helped spread the word. And of course, none of this would be possible without the generous support of our sponsors. There are many of them, and we thank them all:

If this story interests you then you should definitely check out our upcoming conference, Structure 08.

Sun Microsystems now has a firm plan to eliminate its data centers by 2015, which would bring the reality of on-demand computing to a company that has been focused on it for years. Brian Cinqe, Sun’s data center architect, said in his inaugural blog entry yesterday that Sun would cut its data center square-footage in half by 2013, and eliminate it completely by 2015.

This falls in line with CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s vision for Sun (JAVA) to become a company that makes standardized hardware and open-source software to deliver computing power as a utility. I heard Schwartz speak back in 2005, when he compared the utility computing model to delivering electricity. Later, Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos said the company could make a profit delivering the commodity boxes required by on-demand computing much like GE still makes money delivering more efficient power stations (though the comparison isn’t as apt as it seems, since GE doesn’t rely solely on its power-generation business to make money.)

While utility computing isn’t new — Hewlett-Packard, IBM and even British telco BT already provide on-demand computing services — Sun’s announcement is likely to get a big publicity push thanks to the debut earlier this week of Nicholas Carr’s “The Big Switch.” In the book, Carr compares the current shift to utility computing to the dawn of electric power. This is an inevitable shift, and Sun’s announcement (and eventual attempts to rely on utility computing) means the company is willing to practice what it preaches. Unlike, say, the new AT&T when it comes to telecommuting.