Cloud computing does not suit all companies or applications, but it should be a key part of any organisation’s outsourcing strategy, says Forrester Research.

Businesses are faced with a set of choices for providing services, and success means making the right choices, James Staten, principal analyst at Forrester, told Computer Weekly.

“This is not a black and white issue of in-house versus the cloud,” he will tell attendees of the co-located Forrester EMEA 2010 Security Forum and Infrastructure & Operations Forum in London on 11-12 March.

Right sourcing means choosing the most appropriate model to optimise operations for each company and each application according to regulatory and business demands, he said.

Cloud services may not necessarily be more cost or operationally efficient than providing the same service in-house or outsourcing to a traditional application hosting provider, said Staten. “Cloud-based services may in fact be more expensive if the business does not have good network access from all sites or operates under a complex set of regulations.”

more of the ComputerWeekly article from Warwick Ashford

Enterprises today have so much to think about when designing their overall data center strategies. It’s critical that a holistic approach be taken when laying out a data center design. The challenge for many CIOs and their IT organizations today is working with their partner to determine the best approach. First, what to do with the existing infrastructure in place?

With virtualization, many organizations rid themselves of physical servers, despite the significant dollar investment, and went to virtualization. Although many continue to do virtualization in a more phased approach, the understanding was that long-term, virtualization not only provided organizations with cost savings, but also better performance, agility, and flexibility, to name a few benefits. The point is, virtualization was not just about the cost savings, but about the value adds that it brought to the overall IT environment and ultimately, the business.

Similar challenges are being faced today. While enterprises are making the move to deploying cloud computing models in their data centers and leveraging external public clouds, it becomes difficult to determine what to keep and what to let go, particularly in terms of physical infrastructure.

True, driving cost out of IT is the goal, but what about the investment already made? It comes down to the old “rip and replace” story that has plagued so many emerging technologies in the past. Should an organization really consider getting rid of its infrastructure? What happens to all that investment made? Worse, what happens to the IT talent that managed it? It has always been a taboo for any IT executive to even consider this option.

more of the CIO.com article from Vanessa Alvarez

A CIO strategy that includes flexible data center facilities can help organizations through changes in the economy, lines of business, revenues and profitability.

Flexible data center facilities help CIOs add racks, power density and temporary systems as needed. Outsource colocation and outsource data center facilities can deliver this flexibility as an operating expense rather than capital costs.

Outsource data center facilities that offer private cage space and separate square footage/active rack charges allow organizations to build for growth and change.

Carrier neutral data centers with no cross connect fees and help control long-term telecom costs and improve network reliability

Building a hardened data center with 99.995% uptime (equal to Tier IV data center ratings) is cost-prohibitive for most companies. Leasing space in an affordable colocation facility with 99.995% uptime is easy.

Maintaining data center compliance is expensive. Data center certifications can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement and tens of thousands to maintain. Outsource data centers let you outsource data center compliance, such as SAS 70 data center certification, TIA-942 compliant data centers, HIPAA, FDA, FISMA and other regulations.

The most flexible Midwest colocation provider, Lifeline Data Centers, can help you make your data center flexibility strategy happen. Call 317.423.2591.

Of late, I’ve had a lot of people ask me why my near-term forecast for the colocation market in the United States is so much lower (in many cases, half the growth rate) when compared with those produced by competing analyst firms, Wall Street, and so forth.

Without giving too much information (as you’ll recall, Gartner likes its bloggers to preserve client value by not delving too far into details for things like this), the answer to that comes down to:

1. Gartner’s integrated forecasting approach
2. Direct insight into end-user buying behavior
3. Tracking the entire market, not just the traditional “hot” colo markets

I’ve got the advantage of the fact that Gartner producing forecasts for essentially the full range of IT-related “stuff”. If I’ve got a data center, I’ve got to fill it with stuff. It needs servers, network equipment, and storage, and those things need semiconductors as their components. It’s got to have network connectivity (and that means carrier network equipment for service providers, as well as equipment on the terminating end). It’s got to have software running on those servers. Stuff is a decent proxy for overall data center growth. If people aren’t buying a lot of stuff, their data center footprint isn’t growing. And when they’re buying stuff, it’s important to know if it’s replacing other stuff (freeing up power and space), or if it’s new stuff that’s going to drive footprint or power growth.

more of the Gartner Group post from Lydia Leong

Recently, Cisco started saying that virtualization doesn’t actually save money due to increased management costs involved with running a virtual infrastructure. Sure, in the same glossy Cisco was selling its “unified computing” system and management tools, but it may have had a point. Sometimes it may seem like running a virtualized environment is more work.

It’s certainly different, which means there is a one-time learning curve. The ramp-up costs associated with learning management tools for a given virtualization environment are one-time costs, or sunk costs, that wouldn’t factor into the calculation of yearly IT management costs.

There are fundamental differences in the way virtualized servers are managed, however. If these differences, compared to running bare-metal servers, prove to add a substantial management overhead, there may be something to this notion. Let’s talk about four aspects of managing a virtual environment: deployment, managing changes, monitoring and tuning.

More of the Enterprise Networking Planet article from Charlie Schluting

A group of six leaders in the data center industry say that a new standard by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-conditioning Engineers is too “prescriptive” in its attempt to promote data center cooling efficiency, in part because of its support of airside economizers for all data centers, rather than just for those where the technology fits best.

The data center users involved include:

* Chris Crosby, Senior Vice President, Digital Realty Trust
* Hossein Fateh, President and Chief Executive Officer, Dupont Fabros Technology
* James Hamilton, Vice President and Distinguished Engineer, Amazon
* Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President, Operations and Google Fellow, Google
* Mike Manos, Vice President, Service Operations, Nokia
* Kevin Timmons, General Manager, Datacenter Services, Microsoft

Recently, ASHRAE added data centers to its building efficiency standard. The standard defines energy efficiency for most types of buildings in the United States, and is “often incorporated into building codes across the country,” according to a statement on setting efficiency goals for data centers released by the group of six. Here is what they had to say specifically regarding airside economizers:

more of the SearchDataCenter article from Mark Fontecchio

There are many good reasons to shift storage over to the cloud, but the question remains whether large numbers of enterprises are ready to take the plunge just yet.

After all, it’s not easy to give up a tried and true data preservation method — and just because someone says they can provide the same service for less money doesn’t mean you should run off into the forest without a clear idea of what the consequences are.

So in that vein, I’m hoping to highlight some of the actual operational benefits that cloud storage offers. The cloud may be cheaper, but is it better?

Jeff Echols, senior director of cloud storage at CommVault, lists a number of advantages above and beyond the cost factor in a recent Business Week blog. Among them, he cites improved employee productivity by off-loading routine storage operations to a third party, the end of tape archiving, improved disaster recovery, and the ability to access resources based on need rather than what’s available in-house. As long as your applications are secure enough to facilitate the movement, archiving and discovery of data on the cloud, you should find the cloud a much more flexible environment than traditional server infrastructure.

more of the IT Business Edge article from Arthur Cole

Anyone currently involved in cloud computing as a customer, software/hardware vendor, or service provider would be well-served to have a healthy dose of skepticism about them at all times.

We’re (still) in the heady, early days of cloud computing. You know, the lofty part that Gartner labels on its hype curve as the “peak of inflated expectations.” Publications are filled with stories about the promise of cloud computing. Cloud events are popping up right and left (like, say, Cloud Connect, Cloud Expo, worldwide Cloud Camps, SF Cloud Club, and until very recently, two things named Cloud Slam). Customer success stories are still tought to come by and charges of “cloudwashing” are being flung around as some of the less reputable marketers quickly try to latch onto something to get their products some attention.

So how do you judge the merits of anything in an environment like this? The way you always should: consider the potential of the idea, and then watch the results.

This played out close to home for me over the past few months. It has been in this buzz-filled environment that I have been helping CA work on a number of cloud-related acquisitions (in fact, for those keeping track, the recently announced 3Tera and Nimsoft acquisitions are now officially done deals). A number of analysts and industry commentators have been impressed with what we’ve been working on, which is the reaction you always hope for when you are investing the many hours putting these things together.

more of the Data Center Dialog post from Jay Fry

Thanks to x86 server virtualization and its follow-on technologies, the state-of-the-art enterprise data center looks vastly different than it did even a year ago.

Network World — Thanks to x86 server virtualization and its follow-on technologies, the state-of-the-art enterprise data center looks vastly different than it did even a year ago.

And moving from old school to next-generation isn’t just about hardware and software – it’s a call for a new way of thinking about the data center, as well.

“Some people are so accustomed to one application, one server and a methodology that locks you in to one way of thinking that they’re having a hard time fully understanding the new data center,” says Bill Fife, director of technology for Wholesale Electric Supply Co., in Houston.

“But now with thin replication and replays and synchronization to disaster recovery sites, and virtual machines being able to move files from data store to data store and having multiple data stores on the server, and adding network adapters, you really have to sit back and think about how you want to run your operations and remember that you have options. You’re not tied down to any one path. You can go down one road today and change directions tomorrow,” Fife says.

Here are four of the major trends in today’s data center:

more of the CIO Magazine article, originally in Network World by Beth Schultz

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the “Clouded by Chrome: Googles Strategy in Cloud Computing – Chrome as Your Next OS” report to their offering.

Google is pursuing a multi-pronged strategy with the aim of redefining how consumers access online services and applications including mobile applications.

This report analyzes the dynamics of Googles disruptive moves in the world of communication services with a focus on cloud computing. Cloud computing refers to virtualized set of information services offered on-demand and dynamically in a scalable fashion over the Internet. Cloud computing offers an organization the ability to run applications, increase capacity, and add capabilities to its existing IT infrastructure without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, and incurring fees for licensing new software. The revenue generation model in cloud computing is primarily based on subscription and pay-per-use. Changes to IT and provisioning of resources are conducted real time in a dynamic and scalable way as a service over the Internet.

Google raises barriers to entry for potential competitors. For example, processing search queries at very high speeds has been possible with the companys billion-dollar investments in data processing centers. It is clear that Googles ambitions are big and disruptive. The company announced its biggest yet investment in data center in mid-2008, with $842 million representing its biggest capital expenditure for a single quarter. The proceeding sections of this report explore and analyze Googles move in cloud computing, online search and advertisement, and news media in more detail.

more of the Cloud Computing Journal article