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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?"
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).
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
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
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?
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
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