The Coming Death of Corporate Data Centers
Now that I'm running with a VPS setup, I'm wondering: why should a company run its own servers? Unless you're in the hosting business, there's really no point. Look at the prices for services like Slicehost or ArpNetworks, for instance - there's no way that running your own hardware is cheaper than that, when you count in all of the costs (labor, machine acquisition, backups, etc). Just point your domain at the VPS level of service you need and go - over the next few years, the companies that do that are going to save a ton of money compared to the ones that don't.
If you're running your own data center now, and you aren't in the hosting business, you're probably wasting money...
Technorati Tags: data center, vps, hosting
Comments
Re: The Coming Death of Corporate Data Centers
[Travis Kay] January 3, 2010 12:42:03.516
Well, in some cases outsourcing computation and storage can make sense. However, there are often compromises made around privacy, security, availability, latency, portability etc... Tradeoffs such as these might be acceptable for some services, but all out moves to third party providers really perplexes me. Cost is often a major factor, but risk and liability should be part of the equation.
Re: The Coming Death of Corporate Data Centers
[James Robertson] January 3, 2010 13:10:40.177
I'd guess that in most cases, the internal IT guys are no better - and often quite worse - than the people running the VPS services. I think Nick Carr was right about this: over time, running your own data center will be seen to be about the same as running your own power generator. Sure, some places do it, but it's hardly the norm.