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The Twighlight of Small In-House Data Centers
dcblogs writes "Virtualization, cloud services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) is making it much easier to shift IT infrastructure operations to service providers, and that is exactly what many users are doing. Of the new data center space being built in the U.S., service providers accounted for about 13% of it last year, but by 2017 they will be responsible for more than 30% of this new space, says IDC. 'We are definitely seeing a trend away from in-house data centers toward external data centers, external provisioning,' said Gartner analyst Jon Hardcastle. Among those planning for a transition is the University of Kentucky's CIO, who wants to reduce his data center footprint by half to two thirds. He expects in three to five years service provider pricing models 'will be very attractive to us and allow us to take most of our computing off of our data center.' IT managers says a big reason for the shift is IT pros don't want to work in data centers at small-to-mid size firms that can't offer them a career path. Hank Seader, managing principal of the Uptime Institute, said that it takes a 'certain set of legacy skills, a certain commitment to the less than glorious career fields to make data centers work, and it's hard to find people to do it.'"
So, in essence, they don't want to pay IT staff what they're worth and can't find enough suckers willing to be underpaid, and believe the salesman when he says his company can do all of that messy IT work for you, dirt cheap. Heard that same song sung before - remember how everyone was going to lose their IT jobs to Indian outsourcing? How'd that turn out?
Nobody could be dumb enough to make such a mistake, so it must be a pun, clever wordplay or a joke of some sort.
I don't get it, though.
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Actually, the biggest mistake companies make is using the *same* data centers for its core business. If you're in bed with a single provider, then you break when they break. Until there's a standard way to provision and operate things across multiple providers, this is going to be a problem. What we need isn’t a lot of clouds providing services. We need services being provided by a lot of clouds.
My experience in pricing these things out is that it's cheaper in-house. I can spin up a virtual machine on our VMWare/UCS infrastructure for about 1/5th the cost of a higher tier provider. I hear a lot about scalability, but so far I've never been in a position of telling somebody "I don't have room to create another VM for you." Flexibility is a semi-valid argument. It depends on what flexibility you want. If you don't need your test servers backed up, you're either paying for separate tiers in the cloud, or you're just paying for something you don't need or use. If I don't need to back up a VM in my own data center, I get direct savings from not doing so. The backups are just one example.
Cloud makes sense as an offering from 3rd party ISVs. If they have a product, they should offer a cloud option for it, where you pay them and they contract to whatever cloud provider they wish and include it as part of your cost. It's just another one of those tools that we will all use the wrong way because we have to satisfy some kind of managerial mandate. And we won't use it the right way because it jacks up the apparent cost of the products that could truly be a good fit.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
This is why Bill Hicks plead with marketers to kill themselves.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
But even more importantly to the chief accountant is that he will have no local IT guys to beat up and blame everything on when the system goes down.
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
A friend of mine's department was sent a lot of spam this week.
So gmail banned THEIR accounts for 24 hours.
I'm not sure of the logic behind that one.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
We've been using Saas and cloud services for years now... and it's a mess. Contract negotiations are such a nightmare with these companies, we end up employing more people specializing in "contracts" than we would have if we just kept the service in house. We recently had a major project held up for 4 months because we found out the vendor had a different "understanding" of how our data was supposed to be encrypted and they had to haggle all that nonsense out before we could move forward. Don't even get me started on Oracle...
Then you have the whole problem of: You have no control over the vendors financial well being. Not only that, but it's in their best interest to hide financial troubles from you. So suddenly they go belly up and your entire service vanishes. We had a vendor maintaining our series of websites for us and they vanished overnight. Their staff walked out, but lucky for us the owner was a reasonable guy and did his best to get all the data he could to our guys. Meanwhile we had no staff that was in the business of doing web development, though some had a pretty good idea of what to do. But once we got the data we could from the owner, it ended up parts of it were compiled and there was no source code. (I'm sure it was somewhere but the owner wasn't a developer so...) It was a freaking mess. We ended up having to run a website for months with no idea what the source code looked like for some of the more complex bits until we were able to rebuild it from scratch ourselves.
I've worked in businesses which had the opposite attitude. I got paid for what I knew, not necessarily for what I was doing.
It's up to management to allocate resources correctly. So its not an individual's fault if they get assigned the occasional job that is beneath them. And when times get tough, good management is apt to protect their more capable people and keep them busy with whatever work is available.
Boeing used to build furniture. Not because they wanted to be in that business. Or even because they could be competitive in it. It was a way for them to keep their skilled carpenters (when airplanes were made of wood) employed during tough times.
Have gnu, will travel.