Could the Cloud Derail a $300 Million Data Center?

1sockchuck writes "The cloud computing debate has come into focus for taxpayers in Washington state, where a proposed $300 million project to build a data center in Olympia for the state's IT operations is coming under scrutiny. Two legislators are urging the state to shift applications to the cloud instead, noting that two of the largest cloud computing providers (Microsoft and Amazon) are based in the state. The critics say the data center project is driven by an interest in local construction and 'fails to seriously explore the larger strategic question facing government technology today.'"

Comments

Re:could it? Sure. Should it? No

[Anonymous Coward]

Good God, I can't be the only one so sick of this cloud computing bullshit. Seriously, just because it works for some types of data and/or applications, doesn't mean it'll work for everything.

Put down the fucking hammer, not every IT task is a frigging nail.

Idiots.

It would be an interesting archaeology study to dig through messageboards and bulletin boards from the 70's and 80s. I'm sure that you could find people discussing the idea of shifting computing from the big, time shared mainframes to personal computers.

I'm also sure one would find comments like yours, stating how annoying the idea of personal computers sounds like the ubiquitous nail for the universal hammer problem. I wouldn't be surprised if there were several people in the vocal minority who had disdain for non-distributed computing.

Hopefully, in two decades, someone will be digging through Slashdot and laughing about us having to search through the slow-ass "Information Superhighway" for our data.

It's funny how history repeats itself.

Re:*blinks*

[Albanach]

If I lived in that state, I'd be pretty upset by the mere suggestion that it would be a good idea to have all the private information which the state holds about me go through either Microsoft or Google.

If you're hosting your own images and just using their processors, storage and bandwidth then what I would be concerned about is the privacy policy that forms part of the contract. Properly set up however, the important data should be arriving at the cloud encrypted and be stored encrypted. The host should have no ability to access raw personal data.

Personally I'm wondering just what sort of IT infrastructure they have that demands a $300 million data center? With 66,000 employees that's $4500 per employee. Just what is the data center for?

Doing what you do best is best.

[mcrbids]

California spent a pile of money to develop their own data center in the Department of Education. A ton. And the result is less than impressive, with uptimes that approach 95%, and constant notices of downtime, often unexpected, due not only to the occasional software glitch (which happens, even to Google) but also to network issues. (Routers going down, unstable/bad performing connections, etc.)

Given the amount of money spent, the result is just... disappointing. And yet, just a few miles away, there are private hosting facilities with many times the capacity necessary for the state to host all their stuff with 5-nines uptime, with excellent performance levels, demonstrated over 5 years, at rock-bottom prices. Seriously, it isn't until you get to the "enterprise level" hosting that you discover just how *cheap* top-notch hosting is - it's a perverse, inverted marketplace, where the better the quality, the lower the price.

The State of California could have probably saved anywhere from ten to a hundred million dollars by simply renting the (highly qualified!) IT services of a local facility in Sacramento rather than trying to do it in-house. And this is the lesson that I've taken from this and many other situations: Focus on your core competence. Find out what you do best, and do that, because that's best, and outsource anything else you can to save money.

This is where Dell is about to be marginalized, because what they did best is produce decent quality machines cheap and fast, and they've been outsourcing their core competence, meaning that they no longer produce decent quality machines cheap and fast - for many of their lines, they are nothing more than a sticker on the machine. This will work for a while, but once you give away what you do best, you are a leach on the marketplace and eventually, you'll get cut out.

Doing what you do best is best.