Get Out of the Data Center Business

One IT executive's experience with Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

I just spoke with an IT executive at a large marketing and advertising firm. He has completely moved his data center to a local colocation facility. He has two cages at the facility. One cage is dedicated to the IBM Mainframe and the other to his x86 environment. About 40% of his x86 environment is virtualized with the plan to keep virtualizing systems as the opportunity presents itself. I asked him why he moved everything and the answer was pretty simple. “We are not data center experts.” The team found themselves trying to manage and maintain a large bank of UPS batteries, HVAC, power, and he admitted that they were not experts nor did they have any value by becoming experts.

The company has moved everything except for some core networking gear to the service provider. He chose a local provider because of proximity to headquarters (the facility is 5 mins up the street), and the fact that the provider can also provide  geographical separation with multiple data centers for his critical applications.

I also asked about IaaS. I knew the service provider offered IaaS and was interested in how he may think about utilizing the service. Since the company is very application development-focused, he sees a great opportunity to leverage the service provider’s IaaS. Today he has the capacity to fulfill requests, but likes the option of being able to “rent” virtual machines and return them when he is finished. He already experimented once when an internal request came in for a VM with an enormous memory size and they needed to run a test. He contacted the service provider and within hours they had a VM they could work on to perform the test.

I liked his approach. Move existing systems as is and then start to look at IaaS. I think regional service providers have some good opportunities ahead to work with companies like this one to develop regional and industry specific expertise to help IT departments like this one focus on the priorities that accelerate the business.

• Virtualization
• data center
• IaaS
• Infrastructure as a Service
• virtualization