Don't buy cloud computing hype: Business model will evaporate

Compelling devil's advocate view of cloud computing. Author's definition of cloud computing: data center on-demand.

From what you read and hear of the buzz surrounding cloud computing, it sounds like a model that will just steamroller over the whole data center industry and make everything we've built over the past two decades obsolete. It will allow IT to scale without effort, at minimal cost! It is an on-demand data center with zero capital outlay! It slices, dices and juliennes! But even in the best-case scenario it seems like it can only really solve a small subset of the industry's needs. In the worst case it will be a punch line for lame jokes a few years from now, much like other over-hyped buzzwords from the past.

Search Data Center article

Survey: Data Center Budgets Will Stay Pretty Much the Same in 2009

Of course, you only care if it's YOUR budget.

AFCOM survey indicates that nearly two-thirds of managers of large data centers will maintain or increase their budgets in 2009, despite the deepening recession. The remaining one-third will lose about 15 percent of their budgets, with much of the reduction involving travel and training expenses.

A noted data center industry association reported Dec. 23 in a survey of IT managers that nearly two-thirds will see their IT budgets stay the same or even increase in 2009, and that the remaining one-third will lose only about 15 percent of their budgets.

eWeek article

Economic meltdown to change telecom landscape, report says

The tech industry that includes the telecom and the enterprise networking sectors has gone through some hard times in the last 20 years, but the author of a new economic forecast for the technology industry says he's never seen anything like this.

The title says it all. In Surviving a Tech Market Nuclear Winter: A Planners Handbook to Tech Success in Today's Challenging Financial Times, industry analyst and consultant Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corporation, says "it's hard to see how we could have a worse juxtaposition of planning activity and economic events." But Nolle also believes that if companies take the right actions in a bad market, they can come out of this economic crunch stronger than when they went into it.

Search Telecom article

10 Predictions for the Future of SAAS and On-Demand

Here's a compelling set of predictions on some of the business ramifications of software as a service.

oSAAS, or cloud computing, on-demand applications or whatever you want to call it, is increasingly important in the enterprise. One software-as-a-service company, Innotas, provides an on-demand Project Portfolio Management package specifically designed for IT organizations. Customers include Forbes, Hamilton Beach and Simon & Schuster, as well as financial services, health care, retail, technology, telecommunications and energy organizations. Innotas CTO, founder and SAAS evangelist Demian Entrekin shares with eWEEK his thoughts on what lies ahead for SAAS as it continues to grow into a major marketing, sales and administration tool for enterprise business.

eWeek article

Google: Raise Your Data Center Temperature

The following article speaks of a growing trend of raising temperature set points in large scale data centers. Lifeline Data Centers believes this is a viable option assuming that hot air removal is well-managed.

The biggest players in the data center industry are raising the thermostats in their data centers, with some saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in energy costs in the process.

The latest company to focus attention on temperature in the data center is Google. “The guidance we give to data center operators is to raise the thermostat,” said Erik Teetzel, an Energy Program Manager at Google. “Many data centers operate at 70 degrees or below. We’d recommend looking at going to 80 degrees.”

Data Center Knowledge article

Carrier diversity as important as the costs of power

Finally, an article that addresses how important telecom connectivity is to data center site selection.

For data center managers looking for the best place to locate a data center, the price of power has been at the forefront of the discussion. Mega corporations are building data centers near dams to access three-cent per kWh utility rates, but fiber diversity is a growing concern, and is probably number two or three on the site selection criteria.

The Department of Homeland Security advises companies to seek diversity (i.e. multiple vendors) amongst fiber carriers, but the carriers don’t share maps — it’s part of their competitive advantage. And a lot of times, multiple carriers are in the same trench, which won’t provide resiliency in the event of a cable cut.

Serverspecs article

The great paradigm shift of cloud computing is not self-service...

This is the best article on real cloud benefits I have read this year.

There has been significant discussion over the short life of the term "cloud computing" about how little it differs from concepts like managed hosting and ASPs. And there is some truth to these observations; if you really look closely, what are the key differences between EC2 and a more traditional managed hosting provider? Some would say multi-tenancy, self-service and pay-per-use (including billing and elastic capacity). With specific regard to EC2, I would tend to agree.

(I would also hasten to point out that Amazon provides some very PaaS-like services in conjunction with EC2, such as Simple Queuing Service (SQS) and SimpleDB.)

CNet article