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It is not cloud versus in-house, says Forrester
Warwick Ashford
Warwick Ashford email
Wednesday 10 March 2010 03:28

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 Computer Weekly article from Bob Evans

A federal center for coordinating government agency disaster recovery efforts has hit some bumps in the road as it tries to improve how government agencies communicate in times of national crisis, according to a progress report about its efforts.

Members of the Emergency Communications Preparedness Center said they are having difficulty getting agencies to comply with its recommendations, mainly because they have no authority to force them to do so.

This and other concerns were raised in a report released by the Government Accountability Office, which reviewed the ECPC’s charter and interviewed officials from member agencies.

The ECPC was formed in 2007 in the wake of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina to serve as a clearinghouse for the sharing of emergency communications information during a national crisis. Its charter was approved last October.

more of the Information Week article from Elizabeth Montalbano

In the many thousands of articles advising entrepreneurs on what they have to focus on to build successful startups, much has been written about three key factors: team, product and market, with particular focus on the importance of product/market fit. Failure to get product/market fit right is very likely the number 1 cause of startup failure. However in all these articles, I have not seen any discussion about what I believe is the second biggest cause of startup failure: the cost of acquiring customers turns out to be higher than expected, and exceeds the ability to monetize those customers.

In case you are not familiar with the importance of Product/Market fit, Marc Andreessen has a great blog post on this topic: The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 4: The only thing that matters.

In this blog, Marc argues that out of the three core elements of a startup, team, product, and market, the only thing that matters is product/market fit. I agree with Marc’s view that product/market fit is extremely important. However after closely watching several hundred startups that have failed, I observed that a very large number of these had solved the product/market fit problem, but still failed because they had not found a way to acquire customers at a low enough cost.

more of the SOA World article from David Skok

For many companies, computer systems reliability is important. Downtime can mean lost credibility, lost revenues, or worse, lost clients. Downtime is usually expensive when companies depend on computers for Internet sales, customer service, delivery of services, and manufacturing. Many companies calculate and assign costs to their computer system downtime. I recently talked to a manufacturing company who puts the cost of downtime at $360,000 per hour.

How does a company build reliability into their mission critical computer systems? One of the easiest ways is to improve the data center (computer room) facilities. Power and cooling problems are huge threats to computer system reliability.

How does a company improve data center facilities? The company can build their own, or use outsource data center facilities like Lifeline Data Centers. There are a few features to look for in outsource data centers in order to get the maximum uptime for the money:

• 99.995% uptime – 27 minutes of downtime per year or less
• Hardened data centers – buildings sturdy enough to withstand tornadoes and other disasters
• Affordable colocation – find a company with a sensible data center pricing model
• Data center power redundancy – multiple utility power feeds (ask!), multiple generators, multiple UPS and HVAC systems
• Carrier neutral data center – Mulitiple telecom carriers available for options on your best price/value combination
• No cross-connect fees – no monthly add-on fees for the right to connect to other telecom carriers
• Data center certifications and compliance – the more certifications and compliance points, the lower the risk of future problems

Lifeline offers 99.995% uptime data center facilities. That’s a promise of 27 minutes of downtime per year or less. Lifeline’s affordable colocation facilities make it easy for companies to improve their computer systems reliability by minimizing data center downtime.

Does your company need more reliability? Contact Lifeline 317.423.2591.

A number of factors, many of which are the direct result of the recent economic downturn, are combining to make increased data center construction and renovations increasingly likely. Forecasts by IDC and Gartner point to a significant uptick in server sales for 2010, suggesting that a corresponding increase in new data center construction projects and renovations of aging data centers may follow suit.

Reuters has reported that Gartner is forecasting server shipment growth percentage in the range of mid to high single digits for 2010; the research firm predicts that the revenue growth rate will lag slightly behind shipment growth, however. These encouraging numbers follow a rather dismal 2009, which saw server revenue decline by 18.3%, with a unit shipment decline of 16.6%, according to Gartner. Research firm IDC estimates server revenue decline at 18.9%, down to $43.2 billion, with unit shipments down 18.6% to 6.6 million units. Thus, IDC’s estimate suggests that unit shipments and revenue kept fairly close pace in their decline, despite Gartner’s estimate that revenue demonstrated a larger percentage decrease than did unit shipments.

more of the Data Center Journal article from Jeffrey Clark

What are the cost components of your data center? How are you spending money to maintain your computing environment?

In-house data centers spend money on

• Floor space or real estate
• Power to the servers and network equipment (sometimes untracked)
• Power to the air conditioners needed to cool the server and network equipment (often untracked)
• Generators, power conditioning/UPS, HVAC systems
• Security systems
• Maintenance of the generators, HVAC and UPS ad security equipment
• FTE support for the facilities side of IT
• Bandwidth and transport: limited choices and retail pricing from telecom carriers

Companies using outsourced data centers often spend on

• Rack space in shared environments
• Power costs based on something other than usage
• Expensive private suites
• Bandwidth and transport: limited choices and retail pricing from telecom carriers

Regardless, companies often purchase inferior services:

• No hardened data center facilities, or facilities not built to withstand a regional disaster
• Limits on power per rack, cooling and space that can drive up future costs
• Significant single points of failure in the power and cooling systems
• Time and money for internal IT resources to solve facilities and physical plant problems

Lifeline Data Centers is different. Lifeline offers outsource data center facilities with:

• Data center expertise
• High data center high uptime
• A simple data center pricing model that allows you to pay as you grow
• Mulitiple carriers in a carrier neutral data center
• No cross connect fees

Call Lifeline Data Centers at 317.423.2591 to learn how you can reduce costs while improving data center uptime.

Alistair Croll says cloud providers and buyers of cloud computing services need to sort out what’s built in versus what’s an accessory in the cloud. Croll, the chair of the upcoming Cloud Connect conference, calls this the ”roof rack” problem. Cloud Connect is scheduled for March 16-18 in Santa Clara, Calif. This video runs about 2 minutes.

more of the Data Center Knowledge article from Rich Miller

More than a third of large corporate data center users in North America plan to expand their footprint in 2010, and many are expanding because they have run out of power, not space. Those were the key findings in survey data released Wednesday by Digital Realty Trust.

The survey of senior decision makers with responsibility for their companies’ data center strategies was conducted by Campos Research & Analysis for Digital Realty. Among the key findings:

* 83 percent of respondents are planning data center expansions in the next 12 to 24 months;
* 36 percent of respondents have definite plans to make those expansions during 2010;
* 73 percent of respondents plan to add two or more facilities as part of their data center expansions;

more of the Data Center Knowledge article from Rich Miller

Earlier this week, I had a chance to sit with Alex Yoder and James McDermott of Webtrends. Alex and James were in town visiting from their corporate headquarters in Portland, Oregon. It was their first visit to Indianapolis.

What did I learn? Webtrends is delivering real value to savvy companies who want to directly influence demand for their products and services. Clients use Webtrends to develop a deep understanding via multiple dimensions of data on their prospects and customers. Their sales and marketing organizations take that data and use it to tune their products, services and messaging. They use Webtrends to track impact on revenues and profitability. Doug Karr calls this an “accelerator pedal” for their marketing machine.

Webtrends delivers their products as software licensing or software-as-a-service (SaaS). They know that delivering SaaS can increase complexity and drive up costs. So Webtrends “eats their own dog food” in order to measure different dimensions of customer behaviors. Webtrends makes decisions on how to generate new revenue, keep existing clients happy, and protect their profitability based on the data from their own product.

Like Webtends, Lifeline Data Centers helps companies generate new revenue, keep their clients happy, and protect profitability. For example, Consona Corporation uses Lifeline to seamlessly grow and change their data center. Lifeline’s flexible offerings help Consona acquire and assimilate new companies to increase revenue. Lifeline’s 99.995% uptime helps Consona meet services levels to keep clients happy. And Consona take advantage of Lifeline’s incremental data center pricing model to control costs and pay as they grow.

Many of Lifeline Data Centers’ clients are SaaS providers. I’m looking forward to telling my clients about Webtrends and the good that they’re doing for clients.

There are many in the data center industry that have repeatedly called for change in this community of ours. Change in technology, change in priorities, Change for the future. Over the years we have seen those changes come very slowly and while they are starting to move a little faster now, (primarily due to the economic conditions and scrutiny over budgets more-so than a desire to evolve our space) our industry still faces challenges and resistance to forward progress. There are lots of great ideas, lots of forward thinking, but moving this work to execution and educating business leaders as well as data center professionals to break away from those old stand by accepted norms has not gone well.

That is why I am extremely happy to announce my involvement with the University of Missouri in the launch of a Not-For-Profit Data Center specific organization. You might have read the formal announcement by Dave Ohara who launched the news via his industry website, GreenM3. Dave is another of of those industry insiders who has long been perplexed by the lack of movement and initiative we have had on some great ideas and stand outs doing great work. More importantly, it doesn’t stop there. We have been able to put together quite a team of industry heavy-weights to get involved in this effort. Those announcements are forthcoming, and when they do, I think you will get a sense of the type of sea-change this effort could potentially have.

more of the Loose Bolts Blog post from Mike Manos