Data Center In a Box - Black Box | Image Source : Cnet.com
Just because everything can be outsourced doesn’t mean everything should be.
The data center of the future, to the untrained eye, will look very much like the data center of the present. It will still have rows upon rows of server racks and massive storage farms. But look more closely and some significant changes start coming into focus.
For starters, most large data centers will not be owned by the companies that use them. Corporations may still need to keep modest data centers in-house to run essential services and host some applications that are considered an essential part of their DNA, but the rest of the stuff will be hosted in other locations by a number of service providers. In fact, one of the CIO’s primary responsibilities will be to manage a portfolio of these service offerings from other companies.
From a pure cost perspective, it’s cheaper. Moreover, the people who run them can generally do a better job at updating software, maintaining equipment and managing security because that’s all they do. Most companies never really wanted to operate their own data centers, anyway, or at least not the enormous operations that have ballooned out of what were relatively modest beginnings. Data centers have never been a core competency and like any production environment it has to be run at full capacity or something close to that to be considered an efficient use of resources. That rarely happens. Even with virtualization, server utilization inside companies is nowhere near what it is for commercial cloud operations.
The shift to cloud models–for both data and eventually services–marks a fundamental shift in data center economics. It is the second time this model has been attempted, and the first time it is being applied with the kind of flexibility and standards that will prevent vendor lock in.
Selling a possible but untested competitive advantage becomes more difficult the further a company moves away from owning its technology. Innovation needs champions, but it also needs corporate resources. The more those functions are outsourced, the more scrutiny on experimentation and anything that could derail making the quarterly numbers for investors. Read more ……
Wild New Design: Data Center in A Silo | Image Source : DataCenterKnowledge.com
Here’s one of the most unusual data center designs we’ve seen. The CLUMEQ supercomputing center in Quebec has worked with Sun Microsystems to transform a huge silo into a data center. The cylindrical silo, which is 65 feet high and 36 feet wide with two-foot thick concrete walls, previously housed a Van de Graaf particle accelerator. When the accelerator was decommissioned, CLUMEQ decided to convert the facility into a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster known as Colossus. Read more ……
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