The Future of the Data Centre

I had a great morning at the Future of the Data Centre conference at the Hilton Hotel, Park Lane, London.
It is my belief that Energy is THE only issue that will affect the Data Centre industry in the future, if we go down the "cloud" route, we will find out that clouds are made of water, have no real substance, can result in getting very wet, and can disappear as rapidly as they appear. In short, a move to corporate cloud computing needs to be tempered with care and a high level of scrutiny.

Potential buyers of cloud services should be, as a miminum thinking about:

1. Cost, yeah its cheaper now, but how much will it cost in ten years, when energy prices have gone through the roof and you have lost control of the ability to manage your own IT services because they are not on your site.

2. Uptime, how can you ensure 99.99999% uptime in your bit of the cloud, when its hosted by a 3rd Party who is also having to provide the same uptime to all its other customers, make no mistake, someone will lose out when the power stations begin to close and power costs rise.

3. Regulation & Compliance. Do you have to still report on the energy used by your cloud supplier for your CRC reporting?

4. Security, if an England fan can get into the England dressing room in a football stadium with relative ease, with all the security that FIFA has at its disposal, how easy will it be in a shared services cloud facilty for a technician to "visit" one part but get into another area and get up to mischief. Will DC Operators "escort" all visitors to their sites? I doubt it.

So, Cost, Uptime, Regulation & Security as a minimum.

I will be posting on this subject in the future

Outsourcing IT to India

Just a thought to companies planning to outsource IT operations to India and other countries, have you considered the energy impact?
India's power is in very short supply and 70% of the countries electricity is generated using coal fired power stations.
More information on India's energy mix can be found on this link:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cabs/India/Electricity.html

Is it not extremely unethical to utilise a country for outsourced IT power when it cannot even supply power to its own citizens?

I'll leave that for the reader to think about, for me, its wrong and UK based companies should seriously reconsider all aspects of outsourcing not just the cost, because it will turn out to be more expensive in the long run.