Part of the irresistible appeal of the term “cloud computing” is the imagery of computing power as light and floating. For most CIOs, nothing is so immovable as the data center.

The whopper data center bets they must make still pivot around brick and mortar. Here are a few companies that made very different decisions to meet their data center needs in the past year–insource, sell, and build.

For additional insight into data center strategy, see also Bob Evans’ Global CIO column, “Data Centers Behaving Boldly: Meet Tech’s New Rock Stars”)

Insource A Data Center

Whitney National Bank decided to insource a data center, under the leadership of Scott Erlichman, senior VP of technology infrastructure for the regional bank. The bank’s 3-year lease was up on co-location space it used for disaster recovery, and the bank found rates had risen 50% or more since 2006, because demand for such space is high. At the same time, the bank already was planning some construction at a site it owned in Alabama, in order to do some back-end work such as check processing. That made insourcing an intriguing option.

more of the Information Week article from Chris Murphy