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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.'"
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.
"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.
Editors? You haven't been on slashdot very long. They have NEVER had editors.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It is the same issue we face with airlines.
People will shop only based on price, forcing a race to the bottom. Then they will complain about outages and poor service.
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?
Yes, there will be added need for network resources, but honestly, if their network admins can't figure out how to segment their residential from their research networks and throttle the residential usage, they need to rejoin the student body. The real issue with student traffic has always been keeping the existing residential bandwidth fully available for students to do their work, as opposed to having it clogged with people streaming Netflix, doing p2p downloads, and other non-educational activities, and that has little or nothing to do with "Cloud" storage and processing.
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.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Netflix, P2P and non-educational activities are very important for student traffic. These folks live there.
No one works all the time, not even college students.
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 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.
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.
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 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.