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Where Would You Outsource Your Datacenter?
An anonymous reader asks: "I want to outsource everything in our rackspace to reputable online providers. After wasting valuable time every day on mundane problems and upgrades, I'm convinced it's cheaper to pay monthly than maintain our hardware and staff time. So I ask you, Slashdot: who would you turn to for reliable and secure outsourcing of a VPN server, Exchange server, online backup, and webserver hosting?"
.. i'd put my server in orbit.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Imagine the system recovery after a crash? SCUBA anyone?
WebHostingTalk.com -- these forums, although owned/sponsored by EV1.net are proven to be full of quality advice and populated by people who usually know what they're doing and whom to order to rent the hardware/bandwidth/services from.
Ask there if you want to get advice from a multitude of people who deal with those decision on a daily basis.
(No, not affiliated w/WHT or EV1).
http://sagonet.com/
I need a sig.
I have no joke here, I just like saying "reliable and secure Exchange server".
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
do it yourself...
I'm sorry I got go, got a meeting with the Bobs.
No really, I am a consultant and I provide all the services to some companies. I am too busy to accept this work but find a good consultant (that was hard to type with out laughing). The trick is to get the home address of the consultant and his/her parents and other faimly members and tell him/her that you are from Italy.
The GPL, for those that truely understand.
You should be asking "Which company can we outsource our I/T needs to?". Parking your servers in a remote location will not reduce your overall costs, it will only increase your potential downtime. Why? Because you are introducing another point of failure. That point of failure is between your business and the datacentre you have outsourced to.
If you value your data, keep it internal and outsource the support to a solution provider like EDS, IBM, or any of those big firms. They will provide the expertese necessary to supply and maintain the hardware and software for you so you can concentrate on your core business.
It won't be cheaper, but you will be able to easily quantify the yearly I/T costs which will make the accountants happy, and you will be able to pull the necessary funds from a different piggy bank, keeping your payroll low.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
How much are you paying now?
By outsourcing you kill US jobs and lead the country into the CEO & janitor work market. You should support American family values by:
- hiring an under-represented minority to do the job for you even when the skill set is clearly not there
- providing all the medical and dental benefits to aforementioned worker
- providing excellent vacation hours and ability to celebrate racial/ethnic holidays
- aspire to pay top dollar to keep the jobs in the US
From what I read on Slashdot, this should bring booming success to your enterprise and pretty soon you'll start making money in no time.
I have a similar problem. I'm in charge of an IT department that runs a VPN server, Exchange server, online backup, and webserver hosting. After wasting our time with a management staff that doesn't want to adequately staff our department, we've decided to outsource them. Where would go to outsource your management?
If your in a larger scale organization IMHO you should take a look at Totality they do the heavy lifting on our servers running Solaris, Oracle, and Weblogic they do a rather fanatical job. We just put in tickets and they do upgrades and installs, do late at night recoveries, take tapes out of the backup server, etc. They have a nice blend of on-site and remote management. They fix stuff so I can sleep.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Savvis does a good portion of this. They even will outsource an entire data center to a customer (or 2, if you're microsoft).
Check them out
How Jaded Are You?
I don't know the answer to your question, but when you lose your job because of outsourcing your company's IT assets, you can follow this link here.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
My advice is to continue managing your own hardware. Having my own rack hardware in my property and my own dedicated Internet fat pipes, while being able to modify and hack the systems in any way I want is my dream. True, I'm a nerd, but I can't imagine anyone not enjoying changing some RAM or a SCSI hard disk occasionally. It may mean you may have more downtime and maybe even lose some money if your servers support your business, but money isn't everything in this world, there is happiness too, and I personally love to delve deep into hardware.
But because I'm not a yuppie I do not own my own servers, dataroom, and fat pipe. Therefore, when I wanted to start my website, I had to buy the services of a webhosting firm.
I chose WestHost (the link leads to my affiliate page for them, their website is www.westhost.com) which is based in Utah, USA. I have my website hosted there for a year and I really like their immediate support. When you send them an e-mail you can usually except an answer within hours. The services they offer are VPS and dedicated servers, all with ssh access of course, but I am not sure whether they do colocation. It's not a big firm, I think it's family-owned, but they have a beautiful professional datacenter (they have photos somewhere on their site) with P4-3GHz servers with Redhat-based OS (equiped with a nice control panel they have developed) and a very useful forum where existing customers and prospective new customers can discuss, so perhaps you can go there and ask us (the existing customers) about our experiences with them.
Therefore if I was in your shoes, I would first reconsider and try to continue managing my own hardware, and if I could not, then I would ask WestHost whether they can help you.
Since you put it that way: I'd turn it over to no one but myself. Every time I've tried "outsourcing" some component of my online presence (web hosting, DNS, e-mail account), I've come to regret it. I'd rather pull what's left of my hair out fixing something myself than put up with someone else's incompetence. Your Mileage May Vary, but I've found the minuses outweigh the plusses.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Preferably in your building. It's more reliable to put the admin on the other end of a long copper line than your server.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
How can you already have the conclusion that it is cheaper to outsource? If you don't know who could offer you the services you need, how do you know what they charge? You should investigate your requirements, prepare a bid if you keep in in-house, ask for bids to do it outsourced and compare.
Here's the situation I think you want avoid:
Company: keeping vending machines stocked and maintained is a pain in the butt and it costs us $5000 a month.
I know there are companies that provide this service for $2500.
Concusion : Let's oursource!
Gather requirements, ask for bids to do soda and candy machines.
Best bid $6000 a month. Ooops - the $2500 we knew about was only for Soda.
You have to have your requirements together to get bids to make the initial decision to outsource.
Paying for insourcing isn't as simple as it sounds - I worked once helping get rid of an insourcing contractor. They will provide exactly those services that you ask them to, and any changes will be charged a contract modification fee. They will try to take profits in the 35% range on your fee, primarily by under staffing your IT shop. They will assure their permenance by not not documenting anything, or making the system documentation the proprietary property of the insourcing corporation. Not only will it not be cheaper, but it will most likely cost more.
The lesson I learned was that those tricks you use to make your accountants happy and keep your payroll low are short-sighted and ill-concieved. You should be managing the IT budget to make itemized accounting anyhow, and keeping your payroll low just off-sets the true cost of IT, which, until the software stops having bugs, the malicious code stops beign written by human beings, and active intrusion stops originating in people, will remain a something that ranges from just above menial thinking to substantial serious talent. You just can't have enough brains when running enterprise IT.
If your company can turn off the LAN and still turn profits, then they shouldn't even have an IT shop, but if that isn't the case, your company needs to look at IT as an essential horizontal business unit that sits at the table for every strategic discussion, not a cost center where savings can be made by cutting labor.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/ 27/0324214&tid=222
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
How about looking into the ASP model. USi hosts exchange, web, lots of services. SLAs as well.
I host my newspaper at EV1servers, but that's not what you need.
What you need is to outsource all of the day-to-day grunt work. My other company could do email for you but we don't do webservers.
Have you considered splitting it up?
You need to dump Exchange. its the most horrible, time-consuming, labour-intensive and expensive email system possible.
If you must stick with Windows (horrible server OS), "Rackspace.com" does Windows and I've never heard any complaints about them. They aren't cheap, but they are cheaper than having staff and they are very good at what they do. You won't have to worry about them keeping up to date or knowing what to do in case of a problem.
As someone else said, you need to list all the things you do, enter the time and effort and run comparisons. Also, you need to consider the qualiy of the work your staff does and compare it to the quality of the outsource shop.
I know you're not going to take it offshore - the savings are not worth the trouble and while labour costs are lower, hardware and network costs are not. Security is probably important to you - another reason not to offshore.
Daily News http://newsblaze.com
Few things are more obvious to techies than the need to outsource one's management. While a company is small enough for its people to care, the technical folks tend to know what they're doing and why they're doing it and how it all hangs together, and management is just a burden.
Then after a bit of growth, things rapidly turn a lot worse, because management starts to think that it's they who are providing the company's value, and that the techies are just labor.
Long before that happens, the admin and all tiers of management should be outsourced and/or subcontracted out, reporting back to interested techies purely as an external paper-pushing service, nothing more.
It's the only way to stop management getting airs and graces.
The parent isn't in the least bit funny. What's funny (in a sad way) is that techies in this tech-based society let themselves get pushed into a pure-labor subservient role beneath people who are technically clueless and incompetent.
At a POPE, one of my Major Projects was bringing inhouse all of our datacenter operations that we had been paying (dearly) for outsourcing.
The reason is simple: Nobody cares as much about your business as you do. Any outsourcing or insourcing vendor you choose is going to maximize their profits by providing cookie-cutter solutions, and hiring worst-in-breed talent to maintain them.
Unless your needs are truly mundane, you are better of swallowing the bitter pill, and using all of the experience you have already paid for to keep the systems going yourselves.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
1) Eliminate Exchange Server.
2) Analyze value of vpn. Is there really a need to connect just like you are in the building? If no, eliminate.
3) Engage managed services firm to handle your application servers. Put them in another NOC only if you have bandwidth to have decent quality of service.
4) Web hosting depends on the size of the site. Most sites can easily be handled by shared hosting like this example. If you need a server, you can get decent linux boxes for $129/mo or less and windows boxes for about $20 more per month. I'm always amazed when I see someone host a website in house when you can host somewhere else for exponentially less money.
-- $G
Get ahold of the command and control codes for some zombie army and create your own "outsourcing" company. :) Then, offer l33t kiddies some CC#'s to run it all for you. Send your employer a bill from a shell company in Nevada (which is owned by you anonymously). Profit.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
http://www.mind.net/ could provide that, of course. Ask for Chris Leiter!
it all depends on your location.
i would suggest Level 3 or MCI. if it were my choice i would go with Level 3. they have the largest backbone in the nation beside MCI.
1. Get disgusted with IT problems
2. Outsource everything
3. ???
4. Go out of business
I've already given the fatuous response, so let me go back and try a serious one.
Think about this statement for a minute. The costs you are identifying are hardware and software maintenance. Well, those aren't the costs you save by outsourcing your data center.
Outsourcing is about saving head count, and not needing expertise. Unless your hardware is way over capacity, there's probably no money to be saved there; so all you're hoping to do is save on hardware and software support costs. Well, there might be some savings there, but there's not a huge economy of scale, and remember that hosting companies are in business to make a profit. So, will the economy of scale of shared support offset the profit margin? I'd be doubtful.
Maybe what you ought to do is ask yourself WHY your support costs are so high. Start reducing some of those costs, don't just hide them in some third party contract. I've already pointed out one big cost in my other posting--Exchange servers. Depending on the size of your organization, it might be possible to keep the Exchange client, drop the Exchange server, drop in a replacement server, and consolidate half a dozen crashy Windows boxes into one reliable Linux server.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
http://www.sprocketnetworks.com
I do a fair amount of business with them and their services are pretty decent.
http://www.theplanet.com/
Call 1-800-377-6103 and Ask for Enterprise Sales
Also to those who say drop Exchange, what would recommend in place of it? Lotus blows (the client does anyways) so that leaves groupwise in the Groupware product market. I've yet to find a decent GPL groupware product that has a client on Windows that isn't some plugin for exchange.
You can also go fuck yourself, but they are primarily adult content vendors.
That board can offer some insight though, see what they have to say about whom and why.
You also need to realize that WHT is not representative of the market for these kinds of services. A lot of the memebers on the forum are individuals running small or very small hosting programs. There are some big companies, but, its more representative of the small business end rather than the enterprise end. (I assume this is not what you are looking for based upon your question).
Use this as a starting point and then jump off into research based upon what you find here.
It appears you are not looking to maintain your hardware so you would be looking in the category of dedicated servers. A lot of companies provide dedicated servers with various levels of management. You can get complete management or you can basically get no management. Two opposite ends of the spectrum are no management (at ev1servers.net; basically they will reboot or reinstall the OS and that's it) and fully managed (Rackspace; basically do everything upon being asked). And then you have everything in between.
One thing you do need to monitor is to check the quality of the servers the company has. A lot of companies just use no name white boxes for dedicated servers and they come with their own set of problems. Others (like us use RAIDed IBMs; sorry shameless plug). Quality of hardware, as well as quality of service will help you in the long run.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
Also try Colo4Dallas.com, but's it more colocation rather than complete outsourcing.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
Rackspace is expensive but they've never let me down. And it's the only place I know where you can call their toll-free number at 3am and the first person who picks up the phone can have an intelligent conversation with you about FreeBSD kernel tuning.
In five years there's never been any unexpected downtime or network problems, and scheduled downtime has been measured in minutes per year. In the one case where one of the drives in one of our servers failed, they worked hard to get it taken care of ASAP.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
In my experience (and others here it seems), outsourcing your IT infrastructure completely is a bad idea. You lose control over you environment...
Imagine this... You place your servers over at rackspace.com and set up a support contract. A zero-day (or close to it) exploit nails your systems... What priority will your ASP / MSP provide to YOU? Do you really think that your systems will come before the client that is spending 2 - 10 million a year with them?
Take a hybrid approach... Keep your systems in-house and outsource the administration and support of those systems to a local provider (depending on your location, I'm sure that there are many available).
Your contract should include SLA's, guaranteed response times, X amount of modifications per year (X users added, X passwords reset, X attributes changed etc) and a block of support hours. Spend some time getting a rough idea as to how much of the above you or your IT group dealt with over the last year and start there.
This way, you still "own" your infrastructure... If something happens that requires immediate attention or console access, you still have physical access to the equipment.
One of my clients uses the above approach. If they had a full-fledged IT staff to support all of their services and systems, they'd have to keep 7 people on the payroll at an average of $80K per year. They instead keep one well-rounded IT person on-staff and outsource the administration and support to a local IT shop. They have been doing this for 2.5 years and have saved around $500K a year in payroll expenses alone.
I'm waiting for the backlash to this comment as many of us that frequent Slashdot are the administrators in which I'm recommending you replace with service contracts, but it's still a better solution that getting rid of your infrastructure (and personnel) all-together.
Just my 24 cents...
If you have a Microsoft Exchange Server, then you really should outsource it to someone who specializes in it. Exchange Server is a bitch to run and manage well. I outsourced ours (we're a company of 140 users) to a company that does Exchange hosting and nothing else: http://www.123together.com/. Here is what I love about them: they guarantee me 100% uptime (they haven't gone down yet in the last 15 months) and they give me a nice web control panel to manage my server. I used to manage our exchange server internally and it was a real pain.
Remember to think about the perspective of the outsourcing provider. I've been the provider and I've occasionally been the customer, so I've seen alot of really bad scenes.
If a local admin is personally responsible for the operation of an email system at a non-IT company, if it's down for an extended time, it's time to update the resume. In other words, email is perceived to be worth a $75K job to someone, and hopefully the admin provides $75K of value to the company. Also during an outage the admin's entire "business social structure" is unhappy with the admin and the admin have to devote 100%, if not more, to fixing that one problem.
Now outsource to someone with a nice long contract for $50 per month. First of all, with a zillion other customers do they care if the company doesn't get perfect service, and if they don't, they're only worth $50 per month anyway and the contract won't be up for months or years. Finally if it's a bad problem, heck just hang up and work on someone elses nicer problem. In a "sales oriented" organization frankly no one cares if it works or not, just can you sell more.
Its like the difference between a T1 and a DSL line... You're not paying 10 times more on a T1 because the bits are "nicer". With a T1 you're paying for 2am on christmas dispatch thru a blizzard with 30 minute committment time vs the DSL where they might show up sometime in the next 3 business days if you're lucky and they're not otherwise busy.
Basically when you outsource think of the worst case scenario not only the best or only financial.
If a local admin can provide $75K of value to the company, then outsourcing that admin for $75K only works if the outsourcer provides less than $75K worth of value because they've got to make a profit. If you can't afford an integer number of admins, then outsourcing is a great idea because it opens options, otherwise its a disaster waiting to happen.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
People at EV1 do not "know what they're doing", unless it's maybe reselling crap webhosting or configuring some PHP message board via an idiotic web-based GUI.