In the next five years a new way of thinking about, constructing and operating IT will emerge. Data centers are no longer the size of mini-marts but instead are mega-marts like Rob Roy’s 2.2 million square foot Switch data center in Las Vegas. Servers are no longer the unit of computing, but instead are being taken completely apart or are a mere component in the new data-center sized computer, a trend being pushed by Frank Frankovsky at Facebook and at the Open Compute Foundation.

The walls between data centers will also matter less and less as software defined networks help create secure, flexible bandwidth between data centers and eventually continents, which folks like Martin Casado of Nicira are working on. This new era sees infrastructure as a service and the hardware becomes a fungible element, supporting a river of data and applications that flow on top of it. The U.S. government is certainly taking advantage of this shift with its Digital Government Strategy, led by U.S. CIO Steve VanRoekel.

At GigaOM we’ve chronicled the development of this new era in our day-to-day writing and we’ll highlight these trends this week at our 5th Structure 2012 show on June 20 and 21 in San Francisco. Most importantly, we celebrate the people who are orchestrating this change — those who are building systems to enable and take advantage of it. Like any big shift that occurs over years, there are hundreds of influencers who will play a role, but we’ve chosen these ten who are instrumental in driving the vision. And now let’s meet them:

The Engineer
Martin Casado, CTO and Co-founder of Nicira

The Customer
Debra Chrapathy, CIO, Zynga

The Sheriff
Simon Crosby, CTO and Founder of Bromium

The Wildcard
Barry Evans, CEO of Calxeda

The Disruptor
Frank Frankovsky, VP Facebook

The Developer
Tom Preston-Werner, Co-founder, Github

The Researcher
Jonathan Koomey, Consulting Professor Stanford

The Superhero
Rob Roy, CEO and Founder of Switch

The Regulator
Steve VanRoekel, US CIO

The Data Scientist
Andreas Sundquist, DNAnexus Co-founder

Images courtesy of IntelFreePress, DNAnexus, Nicira, Jonathan Koomey, U.S. government, Switch, Github, Facebook, Calxeda, Bromium, and Zynga.

Go to page 2 (of 11) on GigaOM .

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Andreas Sundquist, CEO and co-founder of DNAnexus, suggested this to the entire audience at Structure:Data in New York City on Thursday, adding that “Ten years from now, sequencing will be standard. The test will just be a run of some software.” What makes Sundquist’s claims possible is both the advances in big data techniques and heavy use of the cloud.

Thanks to these two solutions, it now costs a few thousand dollars fewer than $1,000 to sequence a genome; the cost had decreased by a million-fold over the years, even as each genome sequence creates a terabyte of data. So far, around 20,000 genomes have been sequenced world-wide, but the pace increases as the cost falls. And next year, Sundquist expects that 100,000 genomes will be sequenced.

Helping to speed up sequencing efforts is access to and the scalability of the cloud. Most hospitals and medical centers don’t have the budgets to create massive data centers to process or store genome data.

By sending data directly to the cloud from a sequencing machine, there’s no need for medical facilities to manage or process it. And it’s easier to collaborate on DNA data; Sundquist says “Sharing data with other people is simply switching a few bits by adding access, instead of moving the data itself.” That’s important given that he sees the amount of sequencing to grow 10-fold every 2 years.

In the not-too-distant future then, children with a genetic disorder or people with a cancerous tumor could quickly and cheaply have sequencing tests run. And beyond those types of immediate needs, everyone can benefit over the next 5 to 10 years as we use the power of big data and cloud to crack the secrets of our genetic code.

Watch the livestream of Structure:Data here.

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