This is one of the best tech conferences on the planet, and they outdid themselves this year by tying up the end users with the data center. End users, as in "Farmville" addicts - the tens of millions of people who play Zynga games on their PCs and mobile devices. Data center, as in the back-end systems that make the gaming experience possible. When the gaming experience was delivered from a floppy, data centers were not part of the equation. How times have changed. The most telling comment from Zynga: After reaching scale in the public cloud and learning how to optimize their systems, they took it in-house - and by the end of 2011, 80% of Zynga's data was managed in their private cloud, with 66% more efficiency than their public cloud implementation. In the process, during 2011 they generated more data than the entire Netflix video catalog, in HD, times 10.

Pictured above is Allan Leinwand, CTO of Zynga, talking about really big data.