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Technology: Businesses Rethink In-House Data Centers
Building and managing a data center. There are costs related to real estate, construction, power, air conditioning and security. And then there is the cost of the servers and the recurring costs of hardware and software maintenance and upgrades, the cabling, and fire suppression systems. Not to mention the skilled labor required to keep the operation up, running and healthy. It’s enough to have a lot of companies rethinking the wisdom of operating their own data centers. If technology is not your core competency, and even if it is, does it really make sense to operate your own data center?
Steve Ranger of ZDNet recently posed that question to IT leaders. Does owning and managing an in-house data center really make sense? The response? 11-to-1 agreed that in most scenarios running your own data center is a headache not worth having.
Ted Ritter, senior research analyst at the Nemertes Research Group, said that “Cloud computing has the potential to significantly influence the outsourcing decision. As cloud computing matures,application development and delivery may become more cost effective in the cloud than in the data center and more cost effective than colocation and managed hosting.”
Matthew Metcalfe, director of information systems at Northwest Exterminating, said that “There are many factors that determine whether owning the data center makes sense to a company. It makes sense for those companies who have a ‘facility’ or more of resources to manage, while it doesn’t make sense for those smaller companies who may have a handful of servers but require the uptime associated with true data center architectures.”
Will Weider, CIO at Wisconsin-based Ministry Health Care, said that managing an in-house data center is “one of those areas that is deceptively complex filled with trial and tribulation. When I first made the decision to get out of the data center business my sense was that the technical team disagreed. But I am starting to hear members of that team say we could never have built a new data center on our own, and we made the right move.”
