The Twighlight of Small In-House Data Centers 180
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.'"
Come on! (Score:2)
Re:Come on! (Score:4, Interesting)
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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It's because data centers don't have sparkly vampires
Re:Come on! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Good catch.
I get "Twylyte" with ispell --mode Zappa
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Re:Come on! (Score:4, Funny)
Twilight (tm) is now a registered Trademark of the owners of the movie and book series. From now on the rest of us have to use Twighlight
Re:Come on! (Score:5, Informative)
Editors? You haven't been on slashdot very long. They have NEVER had editors.
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An explicit return to the failed timesharing model (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:An explicit return to the failed timesharing mo (Score:5, Funny)
"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.
Re:An explicit return to the failed timesharing mo (Score:4, Interesting)
This is why Bill Hicks plead with marketers to kill themselves.
Re:An explicit return to the failed timesharing mo (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
Say due to future outages the cloud providers aren't found reliable anymore, that cloud OS / software will go right back in-house to the businesses in a thousand different flavors again.
It does tend to get a bit better each time though as hardware advances and software follows suite.
Re:An explicit return to the failed timesharing mo (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Well... managing infrastructure in the cloud = managing virtualized infrastructure... so it's just like VMWare w a GUI that puts VMWare to shame (the GUI is the cloud OS). So there's still an IT guy that logs into the cloud and sets up the extra sever or db or w/e... and no way is that free as with a private VM stack (if you have the server licensing, you need the licensing either way). So... as your infrastructure grows, your cloud costs grow, but that's almost soley offset by no need to upgrade the hard
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People pitched the timesharing computing model for a lot of reasons
And maybe the "PC on every desk" paradigm has it's own problems. But then, Ken Olsen is my hero, so I have my own biases...
Re:An explicit return to the failed timesharing mo (Score:4, Insightful)
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."
Re:An explicit return to the failed timesharing mo (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Oh, cool, that's new to me - and I'd never seen the SNADS protocol before.
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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.
Just because your data center isnt' in-house, doesn't automatically mean "cloud" and "SaaS." I work for a company that does IT outsourcing, and what you're really time-sharing in most cases is the technical talent and expensive data center infrastructure, not the networks and servers.
Many of our customers may only have enough servers for a rack or three. They have the option of setting up redundant power, generators, weather-proof buildings, security, etc., but that would be prohibitively expensive, so we m
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You make a good point on staffing. I work for a SaaS provider and we have good sized footprints at redundant data centers. Our clients pay us to host their applications because it is less expensive for them and we can leverage economies of scale. There are also regulatory considerations that make it cost prohibitive to host certain kinds of data in house.
The biggest challenge however is staffing. There are simply not enough competent IT people in the world. The need for talent outstrips the available t
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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.
The possibility of eliminataing a lot of salaries and the corresponding bonuses for the suits are making them really push hard for cloud and SAS this time.
I still haven't received a good answer for when the whole thing falls over one day and people do not have access to their data. Or maybe even their Applications. And it will happen.
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I still haven't received a good answer for when the whole thing falls over one day and people do not have access to their data. Or maybe even their Applications. And it will happen.
It is called an SLA. You do due diligence when you select a provider. You do an audit to make sure that they can do what the sales monkeys claim they can do. You make them conduct a full blown DR test of your application stack. You make them promise to continue to do tests on a quarterly or bi-yearly basis. You get it all do
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in-house data centers: we have one (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:in-house data centers: we have one (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
But that's no different from any other utility, really. If your power goes out, what then? Yes, there are a few where the cost of multiple cloud hosts would make sense, just like there are a few places where redundant power makes sense, but usually it's not worth it.
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And like anything else, it all depends on how a cost-benefit analysis falls out. People making these decisions without doing their homework first are... well... stoopid.
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And if the guy down the hall is already a lowest-bidder contractor? Most large companies already contract for all their IT - moving to the cloud just frees up real estate, and likely gets them more-qualified IT guys working the contract.
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Yep, once your ISP or cloud provider goes down for a few hours and your chief accountant can't access Extremely Important Documents when he needs them (because they weren't cached on his PC), you'll start thinking about spreading it over several providers with constant replication.
And, you know, may be get a big computer to cache all our documents and put it in your building... Hmm, what to call it? "Local Cloud"? Then may be won't even need replication etc, and we can get a guy to fix it quickly if it breaks. May be we won't even need to renew the contract with our cloud provider!
Not necessarily - my mid-sized company has had several outages of our cloud based finance system and/or internet (having multiple ISP's doesn't help when everyone runs through the same last mile to get to the facility), including a 2 hour outage while auditors were on-site for our annual accounting audit. But that didn't raise any calls to bring it back in-house.
Running it in-house doesn't necessarily make it any more reliable.
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The last statement is absolutely true. In-house systems have outages, too. Sometimes the cost of outages is more than made up for by not having to run a room with a raised floor.
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The last statement is absolutely true. In-house systems have outages, too. Sometimes the cost of outages is more than made up for by not having to run a room with a raised floor.
Of course. No system is 100 percent uptime. But you figure that the uptime is going to be identical between an internet based system and an internal system?
You need to stay in your jobs, both of ya, because at the places I have worked, when you have a room full of 7 figure people twiddling their thumbs because the computers "aren't working", they want to know exactly WHY! the computers are not working, and HOW! you are going to insure them that the problem will NOT! happen again. You guys have bosses
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Neither. What I meant is that clouds need to be Tinkertoys that can be used to assemble services with no single point of failure. S3's Achilles heel is that it's all Amazon. If Amazon has a widespread failure or decide to stop doing business with you, your service is instantly, irrevocably dead in the water.
If you're able to spread your storage among multiple providers as S3 does among Amazon's own machinery, you're no longer at the mercy of one provider. Contract with P1, P2 and P3 to do your raw block
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These are all problems that can be solved. 30 years ago, nobody ever figured the Internet would be able to sustain things like phone calls and streaming video, but it happened.
Point is, don't dismiss it because it's not practical right now. Somebody has to think about these things.
My problem with offsite/cloud storage. (Score:5, Insightful)
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2. is our biggest one.
So far the best we found were totally worthless SLAs that state basically 100% uptime, but your only recourse for downtime is a refund of your payments.
In house we also have visibility into downtime. We now when the parts are arriving and at what stage something is at. No cloud vendor will give you that, because they of course will inconvenience smaller players to keep bigger customers happy. So you can't say "We stole your hardware for a customer 3 times your size".
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Yeah, we have ended contracts with suppliers already for that sort of thing. Someone who can't even tell you when their service will be back are not folks you can rely on.
These are of course not concerns for a university.
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3) The ability of government agencies to scan my data for whatever they feel like arbitrarily and possibly without due process.
How does an in-house data center protect you from that? If they're not following due process for a hosting provider, what makes you think they'll do the same for your in-house data center. People need to calm the fuck down and stop acting like they live in north korea/china.
Re:My problem with offsite/cloud storage. (Score:5, Insightful)
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If they're not following due process for a hosting provider, what makes you think they'll do the same for your in-house data center.
The problem, I believe, isn't the government acquiring the data through illegal means. It's the government politely asking the service provider, "hey, I don't actually have a warrant, but could you please give me XYZ information?"
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While It may be illegal for an entity being asked a question to answer that question, and while it may be illegal what the asker does next to try and get an answer, the act of asking a question should, in all instances, be perfectly legal. No matter who is doing the asking or what they are asking.
Though I would probably be ok with
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What about power and redundancy? What about about bandwidth redundancy? Those two little tick-boxes seems to favor data center centralization for a lot of folks concerned about business operations, uptime, and their associated costs vs. risks.
Maybe if we're talking about a business with multiple dispersed office locations, but still, those larger enterprise clients also seem better served by a real data center. Look at it this way, is your core business power and bandwidth? Can that be outsourced more relia
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its not like you need five nines for every single server. where i work we have a few servers that can be failed over within a few minutes. and most are single servers with only RAID for redundancy. if they go down, yawn. until we get them back up
but when you go to the cloud they have to buy five nines and DR capability for all the customers. in the end its not really cheaper and if you look at the financials of a lot of cloud providers, they are losing money.
the other day i read about a company called Workd
It all boils down to (Score:4, Insightful)
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."
Re:It all boils down to (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It all boils down to (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It all boils down to (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I think my point was that the challenge was to not have the non-educational stuff overwhelm the educational stuff. Yes, there is quality of life, but I am nearly certain that the installation of ResNet projects was not justified in the budget as for being meant to provide streaming movies on demand. In short, you should have your other stuff, but it can't be to the exclusion of your coursework being able to be completed, and the network resource needs for movies or p2p can make it a challenge to make sure
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Every time somebody brings this up, just sprinkle peanuts around your demarc. The eventual squirrel strike will remind them why it is nice to have your data within your local network.
Do the power also, reminding people why they can't use the backup generator room as storage space, as well as providing crispy critters for lunch.
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Correction... (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
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Sir Humpfrey, "Yes minster we just have to finalize the risk assessment and DSE inspection and. Then we can get right down to specifying this update, you will of course need to speak to the treasury to get the to increase the budget
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"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.
Has the question of liability been settled? If your cloud provider bollixes up or loses your best clients work, and there is a huge loss - who is responsible, your company or the cloud provider?
Every cent saved and more might go to a lawyer, because your client is likely to sue both of ya.
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They start to care when their data 'goes away' for 3 days.
But that's very unlikely to happen in the next quarter. Probably not even for the next 3-5 years, by which time they'll be somewhere else and not give a shit.
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The only hurdle left is trust (Score:2)
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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 f
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All valid points, but few of them are insurmountable. Many of the providers, particularly Amazon, offer distributed filesystems, and the ability to spin up in different segments of their overall cloud. If you are running MapReduce operations or load balanced web apps, you're already running software that can handle outages of parts of the infrastructure without stopping, and sometimes, not even slowing down that much.
Now, ensuring that you have a presence where you can spin up processes in the non-comprom
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Some people just are not inclined to trust a service provider with holding their private data, even when it is encrypted/quote.
What, the last 5 geeks still not using web mail? That hurdle was jumped long ago.
But TFA is about businesses with large datacenters today, not your personal anime tentacle porn collection that you need to keep private. There are still a few places where the cloud just doesn't fly, for regulatory reasons (much of the financial industry), which is why "private cloud" is a thing. For everyone else, why run a datacenter?
Lots of luck, chuck. (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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A lot of it does start out cheap with massive discounts. But once your data is moved over, good luck with it being cheap as the warehouse needs to please its shareholders with profits.
Re:Lots of luck, chuck. (Score:5, Informative)
remember how everyone was going to lose their IT jobs to Indian outsourcing?
Half of them did.
How'd that turn out?
Depends on your perspective.
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You hit it on the nose. That's why I went to go work for a MSP. My previous employer knew full well that I was underpaid, but didn't want to bring my pay anywhere near DOL medians for the area. I saw a lot of job openings where that wanted the guy to do everything from tech support to DBA all for $40-$50k. I looked for a job where the position is where the money is made and not burdensome overhead. I left for a 60% increase that they didn't even bother to try and counter to my boss' dismay.
At the MSP, the s
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I had that once, but they had nerfed my resume and inflated their favourite canditate and even cut and pasted some bits on mine into his. I'd brought printed copies of the original to the interview, so could compare them and hand the original to what is now my current employer. That's the sort of stupid shit some recruitment agencies pull on
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Seriously - a couple years ago I saw a photo spread in National Geographic. It was what appeared to be a nice residential enclave in southern California but instead it was in Bangalore.
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This is exactly right. It's easier and more reliably profitable to work with domestic industries than to accept piecework from a country where there's a language and time zone barrier to collaboration. Companies in India were not capable of delivering a consistent result, because companies in the US were unable to offer consistent guidance and management. Pretty much as predicted by all the outsourcing skeptics. Once the domestic demand for IT services in India took off, outsourcing lost its luster for buye
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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.
If the cloud host has a track record for reliability that's as good as your IT staff, why keep the IT staff, and all the headaches thereof? The cloud hosts have a pretty goiod record thus far, and quite a few inhouse IT departments don't. Remember most of these companies have already outsourced their IT to the cheapest contractor.
Virtualization, cloud services and SAS (Score:4, Insightful)
In-house is cheaper... so far (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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My experience in pricing these things out is that it's cheaper in-house.
Your assertion is only true if your IT needs are mostly static. In my experience the following things happen continuously:
Our online service is growing 5 times faster than we predicted. We need 5X capacity in the next two weeks.
We've changed our software application design and the hardware we have in not appropriate for the new design. Get rid of it and bring in a new hardware design, all while keeping the service running.
That's the reality for any nimble and fast growing business. That's why cloud i
ih-house - not in your house (Score:2)
Heck, I got all excited over the title at the idea of renting out an unused guest room as a data center,
3 to 5 years? Not so sure about time frame. (Score:2)
I think offsite data centers will become more popular. But, I do not expect any major shift within that timeframe.
Internet access has to become much more reliable, fast, and secure, before such moves become practical for many companies.
No Hypervisor Support (Score:2)
In which I call bovine effluent (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Instead of spending your life chasing cable through raised floors, you cold be working lots of admin tasks, troubleshooting desktops, helping management spec h/w and s/w acquisition. Maybe even a bit of application development and testing.
diverse tasks (Score:2)
There is the old saying that if you have to change an end user's mouse you are not a system administrator. Doesn't matter how many servers you actually admin. If you deal with end users you are help desk and/or a technician and can only be expected to be paid at that level.
People seem more willing to pay for depth of knowledge but not willing to pay for breadth of knowledge. So they end up with "experts" who say, "That is NOT my job". I am a professional. I get paid to get the job done. I do not care
Re:diverse tasks (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I don't know about you guys ... (Score:2)
When "Twighlights" Collide (Score:2)
Amazingly, the "twighlight" of data centers coincides with the twilight of spell-checking.
Your work account is suspended (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Wont happen (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Job Security (Score:2)
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.'"
I guess that makes my skills more valuable since there's a shortage of skilled admins.
Could I do this at home? (Score:3)
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Only for easily-migrated workloads (Score:3)
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 Wish ... (Score:3)
Good for some, no so much for others (Score:2)
But if security is off the scale cri
Re:Twighlight. (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
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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