Those that invest long work hours in game-changing DevOps, or in ensuring the data center beast’s mechanical and electrical heart continues to pump, understand that we are in a period of extraordinary and rapidly accelerating demand and data growth.
This is the twilight of the industrial era, the still early light of the digital era is dawning.
DCD>Webscale opens with over 1,200 pre-registered data center professional delegates on Tuesday, June 20 at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis with this story. It’s compellingly told by Dr. Julie Albright, a lecturer on digital sociology at the University of Southern California. She is a frequent media “go-to” spokesperson on all things social media (including CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, and Dr. Phil). However, for USC’s Energy Institute, she has also helped develop major projects in sustainable infrastructure and smart, micro-grid energy management.
“We’re in a time where people, businesses, industry and government grow increasingly reliant upon ubiquitous connectivity,” says Dr. Albright. “This life-on-the-internet is transforming all kinds of interactions at all levels of society. On a micro level, it impacts personal relationships, as more and more people meet and continuously communicate with their friends and partners, primarily via digital devices. On the macro level, smartphones and social media are catalysts for sweeping, often unanticipated, social and political changes, such as witnessed during the Arab Spring.
“Digital connectivity has become so integral to people’s lives that when Facebook went down in the Summer ‘14, so many people in Los Angeles called 911 to report this ‘emergency’ that frustrated sheriffs tweeted back “#Facebook is not a Law Enforcement issue, please don’t call us about it being down; we don’t know when FB will be back up!”
Dr. Albright keynoted DCD>Enterprise in New York City this past March, and was the stand-out hit of the conference. “Why? I think it’s because she took our traditional audience of large-scale data center and cloud infrastructure senior executives and engineering professionals to a place that maybe they hadn’t seen or contemplated before,” says DCD conference chair, Bruce Taylor. “She got them to see, in a very visceral way, just how fast digital society is evolving, and why there’s no going back in the zettabyte era. She shows us the present and very-near-future demand for network edge and hyperscale cloud services in a way that cannot be escaped for its implications to our industry.”
Autodesk and the future of making things
If Dr. Albright reveals the ‘why,’ then a compelling view of the ‘what and how’ comes in the 9:00 a.m. conference opener keynote by Lloyd Taylor, the chief of cloud infrastructure at iconic design-engineering software provider Autodesk.
The company is radically changing design, construction, manufacturing, and media through its Future of Making Things transformation. Lloyd and his team are responsible for designing, building, and operating the global cloud infrastructure to support this massive transformation.
In a time of superheroes, Autodesk’s Taylor calls it “superpowers for engineers, bringing generative design and deep learning in industrial-strength webscale design and operations.”
Free passes are still available to qualified end users. Register for DCD>Webscale today.