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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.'"
"Twighlight"? Editors don't even read the titles anymore, it seems.
People pitched the timesharing computing model for a lot of reasons, lack of control of the hardware and the software rental treadmill being two of the largest. Every time I hear someone gushing over The Cloud and Software As A Service, it's history repeating itself.
Dog is my co-pilot.
In general this is true of any industry. As certain services no longer become differentiating and become commoditized, you're going to get a situation where its best to outsource these activities to the player who can do it for you cheapest.
The biggest mistake that companies make is when these data centers are part of your core business. For a University this is not the case - their core business is research and education. For my company, however, we will continue to run our own geographically redundant datacenters because they power our core business - we're a text message gateway.
That there's a 'twilight' is just the natural progression in any industry - however just figure that the jobs that remain in data center work will be directly involved with the core business. If you're at RackSpace or Amazon, then the data is your core business. If you're like us, then the datacenter is so critical to core business that you're de-facto in a position of power in the company.
Good luck to those mediocre data center managers at centers not involved in core-business. I'd start looking for a new job now.
I have a threefold problem with "cloud" storage/computing 1) Lack of control/physical security, up to and including removing my access to my own data due to a violation of some cockamamie TOS or similar agreement. 2) No ability to remedy downtimes, while rare, still do happen. 3) The ability of government agencies to scan my data for whatever they feel like arbitrarily and possibly without due process.
I hate sigs.
What level of risk you're willing to bet on your Internet connection(s).
It will be less than optimal when 20,000 kids in the school are streaming netflix in their dorm rooms while
their professors are trying to work on their research grants on the file servers in the clouds.
Combine that with multiple legal implications of the data being contained on the low bidder data center most of these kind of people will pick
From the article:
>>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.'"
Which to me means "The real reason we can't find anyone to work in our data centers or provide any career path is that we're unwilling to pay anything above minimum wage."
"much CHEAPER to shift IT infrastructure operations to service providers"
It's not about easier. It's trading control, stability, and uptime for Lower IT operation costs. Executives dont care about safety of data, stability, uptime or control. All they care about is how good does the next quarter look to the board. Who cares if the company tanks in 5 years, Next quarter is all that is important.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Trust is not the only hurdle.
Lack of insight into downtime and worthwhile SLAs. Simply getting a refund is not good enough when an hours downtime cost you a 10 million dollar contract. We literally have contract like this. This means we would if we had to steal hardware or resources from other projects to keep that system up and running or to return to service faster.
You can't do that with a cloud provider. If they have an outage you are stuck at their mercy. They will have downtime, not only is it just a fact of life, but they are going to try to provide your service as cheap as possible to increase their margins. Also because if they don't you will select a cheaper provider.
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?
Virtualization, cloud services and SAS won't replace conventional services until our 'broadband' is faster and more reliable than that offered to the consumer at the moment ...
AccountKiller
Because Twilight is too mainstream.
"All of this has happened before and will happen again... every five years".
You have to admire the creativity of giving the exact same concept a different name every time.
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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!
"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 is complete and utter bull!
Now if they wanted to pay a reasonable rate then yes, maybe they'd get people to work for them. But until such time those small to medium shops stop being so cheap about what they pay their I.T. people they need to STFU right now.
This is why Bill Hicks plead with marketers to kill themselves.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It is the same old stuff in new wrappers. But therein is a statement:
1) In house development and app hosting weren't working. Why? Costs? Pains? Staffing? Budget
2) It's just about as secure to do things internally as on external hosting because if you do the job right, there's truly no secure boundary and people learned that.
3) Vertical market software is getting really good, and SaaS can even be satisfactory for some-- and vastly less than doing it in-house.
4) Less Capex. No huge front-end expense to setup shop/branches. Rent everything.... every IT cost is OpEx rather than CapEx.
5) Stuff moves to quickly to keep up, perhaps. Tough even for us old sages.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Actually hosted Exchange is one of the things that actually DOES work out to be cheaper for many organizations. You can't do a three node DAG + admin for less than what Office365 costs until you get to about 300 mailboxes. Hell we're at 900 mailboxes and it was close for us but the small max mailbox size and the fact that it was OpEx rather than CapEx killed it for us.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
What your missing is that almost everything in IT has been history repeating itself for 20 years or so now. Just about everything cool, sexy, and new has been stuff the mainframe guys did long ago. Timesharing is just the latest. That's not a good thing nor a bad thing, it's just a predictable thing.
Really, the only new ideas have been AJAX (without which the web looks very much like mainframe-terminal interaction) and streaming (which changes how you want to cache stuff in an interesting way).
The industry will circulate between "centralize everything" and "decentralize everything" on a 20-year-ish cycle forever - it's just long enough for CIOs to seem clever as most have forgotten the last time we did it. In another 10 years I expect to see /. posts about "Every time I hear someone gushing over , it's history repeating itself."
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
That's "Every time I hear someone gushing over [whatever P2P is called now] , it's history repeating itself." Freaking Slashcode will be exactly the same in 20 years, that's for sure.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I've wondered how feasible it would be for me to purchase a few good servers, upgrade my home internet to business class, and provide some hosting services as a on the side, part time business. On the surface, it doesn't seem like a tremendous amount of effort or investment, other than to get a customer base installed.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
This is rant....you've been warned
There is a shortage of cheap IT workers who will work in sweat shop conditions and not ask for benefits and not get upset at working insane hours.
I am so frustrated of hearing about how there is this (non-existent) shortage of workers too. It's total bull.
I've posted this before: it's amazing how often I hear at an interview "you have great experience", "you have exactly what we are looking for"....blah only to get an offer of less $ than I'm currently earning. IF there really is a shortage, and I am really "great" and "exactly" then they should be at least offering what I'm currently earning.
Being on the hiring side, it is hard to find workers, not because they don't exist. They don't want to change jobs. And why don't they want to change? I'm guessing the same reason I stated above. Employers are being cheap ass and refusing to pay skilled workers what they are worth. So no one wants to leave, risk taking less money, risk being at the bottom of the totem pole.
This "shortage" is nothing more than an excuse to import more labor than hire local already existing labor. The CEOs and bean counters are manufacturing a shortage to justify their own means
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
That's hilarious, but 100% true, the main allure of the cloud right now is infrastructure automation... but what's that done through?
Cloud OS / software.
Just wait until the suits find out they cannot throttle the IT guy in order to get something done, then find out that to their holy cloud provider, they are just another customer.
It's the same thing with insourcing versus outsourcing, which is the twin brother of the cloud. Just try putting heat on the outsource folks to shorten their deadline. They might have alot of customers, and putting you first puts others later, and you aren't worth the trouble. You can save money outsourcing, except when you can't.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Cloud utilization is growing. And it's growing in startups and small companies. The reason isn't because of career choices by IT professionals. It's because it's a lot easier to buy a cloud-based solution with your company credit card than to requisition a VMware cluster.
Much of Amazon's cloud customer usage is for shadow-IT and small startups who do development work. Microsoft spent over $3bn on Azure and has little to show for it. Of course, object storage is a no-brainer for streaming content providers because who cares where you store a large block of data.
Regarding uptime and connectivity, Amazon suffered a major glitch last year that tanked Netflix for about a day because they didn't have enough connection redundancy. Their are providers out there who do. One I know of has multiple availability zones in the US, 3+-homed internet, and power from at least two non-connected grids.
Organizations are moving to the cloud, but large enterprises are not moving their legacy applications to the cloud. Yet. It's really hard to migrate 1000 applications running on legacy hardware, some of it with outdated OS's and non-x86 hardware.
It will eventually happen because companies are sick of having Chief Electricity Officers.
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.
Here in healthcare we'd love to be able to use more "cloud" services, where it makes sense. One of the main problems we have is a stated lack of HIPAA compliance. Also the ability to integrate these services. For example, how do I integrate my "cloud based" (read: web app) health information system with my web based office suite and do it securely?
This, and trusting my data to another company is scary as hell.
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