Eyebrow raising quotes from GigaOM Structure

This week, GigaOM hosted their Structure conference In San Francisco where some (if not most) of the who’s who in the cloud share their visions, opinions, and prognostications around the hype that is the cloud.

Based on the coverage of the event, and the conversations and comments made in social media, this is one event I just might have to attend next year. Because, let’s face it…the cloud has already, and will continue to have an impact on the products and solutions Seagate brings to market. If you don’t design for the cloud, to quote Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, “If dinosaurs aren’t changing, well we know what happened to dinosaurs.” – more…

Here are a few of my favorite quotes from GigaOM’s coverage of the conference:

On the demand for bandwidth: “Even the fattest multi-gigabit pipes look like cocktail straws when you’re talking about petabyte databases” – more…
On IT Strategy: “The world around us has changed so dramatically… that when businesses go to set up their technology, the cloud is not the thing they put off in the corner of their organization. They make it central to their strategy.” – more.
On database management: “The care and feeding of a database is a full-time job, sometimes many full-time jobs,” he said. “When data gets very big, it starts to crumble.” – more…
On vendor lock-in: “We’ve moved into a future of massive amounts of data and computing. We’re dominated by the ability to move data around…Data is the lock in.” – more..
On software driven architectures: “…generic hardware and components that are being used to fill massive football field-sized data centers. The generic hardware might have high failure rates, but the software acts as a orchestration layer… It’s a way to “scale out, instead of scaling up.” – more…
On Big Data: “I don’t think of video first as big data, but you can leverage it as big data.” – more…
On traditional IT vs the Cloud: “Don’t invest in in-house servers…The master copy of our data is now stored in the cloud.” – more…
On power & cooling innovation: “I envision data centers being built in deserts next to giant solar farms, and it’s this crowd that can deliver the innovation needed to make that happen,” – more…
On entrepreneurship: “The fundamental principle around democratizing data is the shift in power away from this large institution to individuals.” – more…
On Big Data analytics: “We need to connect those petabytes of data to humans in a workflow. We put the Excel user in the feedback loop. We have to democratize how users can gain insight with our big data strategy.” – more…
On Open Compute: “the company manages 10,000 servers with one systems administrator inside its data centers, in part thanks to the design considerations it pioneered with Open Compute.” – more…
On Content Delivery Networks (CDNs): “The Akamai network currently handles over 2 trillion requests a day…and about 3,000 hours worth of content every minute — that’s 2 trillion transactions of some kind involving content that needs to be moved across the network from one of the company’s thousands of nodes in hundreds of countries around the world.” – more…
On virtualization & software: “A data center looks a lot like a museum of past IT decisions,” – more…
On security: “If you peel back the onion a little bit, about 90 percent of those concerns are really perception versus reality — in other words, it’s evident to everyone that your money is better off in the bank, but with data, people are like ‘is it really safer in the cloud?'” – more…
On cloud adoption: “Outages happen, data centers break.. Amazon and other cloud players have given you tools to build around that…the fundamental issue for CIOs is not the security of the cloud, but grasping where the cloud stops and where their own roles begin.” – more…