He said that the technology was still too early even for early adopters as most people aren’t ready to upgrade their televisions after buying HDTV sets within the last five years, adding that he first viewed HDTV in Japan in 1992, about a decade before HD finally starting hitting mainstream adoption. Since technology shifts take time, and 3-D has a “chicken and an egg” problem of needing compelling content before consumers invest in the hardware while hardware manufacturers need widespread adoption in order to lower the prices of equipment, he isn’t worried about meeting the bandwidth needs of 3D-TV yet.

He said that his content delivery network, which serves some 3,000 media companies, is focused instead on the terabytes of HD and standard definition media that it handles today, as well as improving and delivering content optimized for the myriad mobile phones out there. So, despite the World Cup showing in 3-D, Virgin Media saying earlier this month that it plans a 3D-TV channel and more movies like “Toy Story 3″ hitting theaters, we appear to still be a ways out from a massive 3-D bump in network traffic.

Related GigaOM Pro Research (sub req’d):

Moorman and fellow panelists at the GigaOM Network’s Structure event in San Francisco discussed a few ideas for lowering barriers to adoption of PaaS. Moorman emphasized that PaaS requires customers to make a trade-off. You can reap flexibility and improved developer productivity, but will be “making a commitment to where your application can go,” tying your code “not just to technologies to a set location.” That makes people nervous, he said.

As these services evolve, said Mike Piech, senior director for product marketing at Oracle, we’ll see “standardization up the stack.” That will enable more portability, which Moorman sees as key for the PaaS market to grow. “Are the components in the stack standard enough that they can be deployed elsewhere?” Without those standards, PaaS may for many customers represent “just too big of a bet.”

While Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo argued that “the definition of platform is lock-in,” Byron Sebastian, CEO of Heroku, disagreed, stressing instead the importance of openness for PaaS providers. “Lock-in is bad. We feel we have the right to try and win your business. If we do a bad job, you should be able to port it over” to a different provider, he said, adding that the “inherent value” of PaaS “is operating things at a huge amount of scale,” gaining access to wider and more specialized services, as well as to new types of customers. “The value of PaaS is the network. When you start building walls around that, you’re cutting off the network.”

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Speaking at GigaOM’s Structure conference event in San Francisco, Norrod said Dell started out talking to Microsoft, Yahoo, “all the folks you’d expect,” trying to learn about their priorities, how they measured data center efficiency and infrastructure costs. Oftentimes, he said company architects welcomed new solutions. According to Norrod, however, “Operations folks in the data centers said, ‘You’re moving my cheese too fast, disrupting my operational playbook.’”

Since then, Norrod said Dell and some of its customers have taken “sort of a journey together,” arriving at a point where today, “it’s hard to draw a hard line around some of our systems and say that’s the server, that’s the data center.”

Separately, executives said at Dell’s annual analyst meeting today in Texas that Dell aims to double its $16 billion data center and services business over the next three years, partly through acquisitions. When it comes to the DCS group, Norrod said Dell is interested in technologies the company can use to help its hyperscale customers increase power and memory density, decrease latency and improve other metrics.

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Rather than the current ideal of the homogenous cloud — where uniform, consistent building blocks scale in tandem — Waxman called for a “best of breed” standardized cloud. He said this alternate kind of cloud would be good for both data centers and vendors. It would be federated, connecting virtual machines between public and private data centers. It would be automated, both for power and workflow placement. And it would be client-aware, recognizing the fast-growing ranks of connected devices (Intel projects 10 billion of them in the next five years, including phones of course but also TVs and cars.

Besides issues like cloud vendor computing lock-in, one of Waxman’s biggest selling points is power consumption. He said that a homogeneous system of 15,000 servers, even considering virtualization and efficient workload placement, would overspend $6 million worth of capex and 1 megawatt of power. Projected growth in cloud computing — where 23 percent of data center costs are power, he said — would demand seven new coal power plans in the next 10 years.

If anyone agrees that cloud computing should be more secure, more manageable, with better federation of data, they should come talk to him, Waxman said.

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Network engineers from Yahoo, Facebook, PayPal and Zynga told the GigaOM Structure conference that startups and other companies need to think about how they’re going to scale their information infrastructure as they grow. However, the panel said that companies also need to recognize that their predictions will probably be wrong, and look at using cloud computing services to make it easier to adapt that infrastructure later.

Mark Williams, vice-president of network operations for Zynga, said that one of the things cloud computing has done is to provide a relatively manageable number of infrastructure pieces — whether it’s servers, software or a combination of the two — that a company can put together to scale quickly. Zynga, for example, doesn’t know what kind of demand or traffic a new game will produce when it first launches, so the company focuses on having a suite of infrastructure pieces “and then the network team works with the developers and we can swap those pieces out if we need to, and experiment in real time to solve those challenges.”

Facebook’s VP of technical operations, Jonathan Heiliger, said one thing the company has found as it’s grown to more than 400 million users is that whenever it predicts that demand for a new feature or service will be really high, it isn’t, and “when we predict it will be really low, it turns out to be really high.” Jay Parikh, the director of engineering at the social network, said one thing the company does is to try new features with a small group of users “so we can see what adoption rates are like, and then to extrapolate to what it’s going to be like when you turn it on across 400 million users.”

Todd Papaioannou, VP of cloud infrastructure at Yahoo, said that people like to say scaling problems are good problems to have, since it means a company is growing. But companies need to try and think about scaling issues as early as possible when they’re building their systems, “because you’re going to be stuck with them for a long time,” and it’s going to be very difficult and very painful to go back and re-architect later.

Meanwhile, PayPal’s VP of customer quality, Matthew Mengerink, said that companies also need to focus on developing a business model that allows for such incorrect predictions, because they will happen and companies will have to re-architect their infrastructure. “You can’t predict the future or what yo’ure going to need,” he said, and if you don’t spend time on your business model, “you won’t have a scale problem because you won’t have any customers.”

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The most successful vendors of software-as-a-service, or SaaS, according to Mickos, will be those who can offer a model similar to banks. “Today we put our money in the bank because we know it’s safer there than at home,” he explained, and because we’re confident that at any point we can withdraw our money. “That apparent lack of lock-in is what creates the real lock-in, which is loyalty from the customers.”

Augustin described a scenario where this would matter in the marketplace. “If all your data is at one place in the cloud, and all of a sudden that data goes away,” (due to a power outage, for example, as small businesses relying on Intuit’s services experienced first-hand this month), then you lose all access. But with a more open SaaS model, you could run a local copy or “go over to a cloud service provider for a day or two,” said Augustin. “Of course, you don’t just need the data; you need an application that can get to it.”

Eventually, Mickos predicted that customers will demand the same sort of freedom with their data that we currently demand from banks when it comes to our savings. “I would like to go to Google and say, ‘Give me all the searches I’ve ever made, and stop using them,’” he said. “But I can’t.”

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The biggest lesson he’s learned in the past year is “you can never think about scale too early,” Heiliger said at GigaOM’s Structure conference today. “We’ve thought really far ahead but we’ve also punted on really critical things that we needed to do,” he said. “Now we’re under the gun rather than being able to do them on our own time.”

Heiliger didn’t specify what Facebook had punted on, however he mentioned the company has replaced some of its larger systems such as the way it serves platform traffic. Facebook has also undertaken recent projects to improve site speed. A couple months ago the company killed its “Facebook Lite” product (a re-engineered version of the site built to be extremely fast), with the explanation being partly that the learnings from building a streamlined version had been incorporated into the main product.

But scaling Facebook is also about continual evolution, said Heiliger. A huge part of the service’s infrastructure success comes by way of benefiting from and contributing back to open-source technologies, he said, naming HipHop for optimizing PHP code and Haystack for managing its massive amounts of photos (1 million delivered per second, expected to be 10 times that within a year, he said).

Facebook primarily relies on its own infrastructure because it likes the agility, performance and cost reductions that come from control, Heiliger said. (On the negative side, that’s led to the unforeseen “bottlenecks” that Heiliger said he regrets punting on.) The company is now building its first data center in Oregon, which Heiliger said is due to be turned on soon. But he advised young web startups to do the opposite — at least to start.

“For a consumer web site starting today I would absolutely use the cloud,” he said. “I wouldn’t hire someone like me — we’re really irritating, cynical people and we make silly remarks at conferences.”

Heiliger was referring to widely publicized comments he made a year ago at Structure 09, where he threw down the gauntlet for semiconductor and hardware makers, saying they weren’t up to the task of serving the needs of enormous, growing web businesses like Facebook.

Today, Heiliger said those companies have come a long way in the last year. Facebook recently released a benchmark paper on CPUs, finding a 45 percent improvement in dollars per watt between this generation and the last. Heiliger also mentioned startups such as SeaMicro and Tilera and their promising multicore efforts, saying Intel and AMD were also pushing similar projects. (The CTOs of both SeaMicro and Tilera spoke at Structure yesterday.)

However. Heiliger invited cloud hosting providers to contact him with proposals. “At Facebook we look once or twice a year if we should put more infrastructure in the cloud or ourselves,” he said.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.

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