The Cloud Realities Spotlight at VMworld 2011 covered some of the biggest of the biggest disruptors the industry has been seeing lately, as well as the whole big data trend that’s been going on in the past year or so.

Manish Goel, EVP at NetApp joined for the first of two sessions, and talked about how costs, efficiency and data growth are putting pressure on companies to catch up in several fields. He continued that IT is the biggest bottleneck to business transformation, and that no company  can afford to skip those issues.  He also detailed the NetApp perspective – according to him, the company’s growth and current market position as the no. 2 storage vendor give it credibility from the customer’s point of view that it didn’t have before.

Moving on to big data, Goel elaborated on the three key trends and focus areas that fall under this term.  In analytics, demand for scale and speed is “outpacing traditional relational database structures,” he said, and emerging platforms such as columnar DBs and MapReduce-based platforms are taking over.  The second trend is a surge  in bandwidth consumption especially evident when it comes to online videos, and scalable containers are the third, also outpacing traditional data management constructs.

In Part 2 panel moderator Stu Miniman, VMware’s Matthew Lodge, Brian Gracely of Cisco and Jay Fry of CA sat down to talk infrastructure and cloud management. The topic of cloud service providers also came up.

While some are choosing similar models to that used by AWS and the other major players in this space, others are looking to differentiate themselves from the rest of the market.

“We see more and more service providers that are trying to do what they do and differentiate it. There are unique situations in emerging countries; maybe it’s trying to roll out a couple of mobile apps for a certain type of business,” Gracely said.