Hosting
Comments and opinions about the world of Hosting and IT in general
Friday 5 December 2008, 4:45 PM
Head in the Cloud
October brought me the chance to sit alongside DELL, Intel & VMWare for ZDNet’s Breakfast Briefing on virtualisation, and also brought me a virus infection that totally floored me for 3 weeks which scuppered the former invitation. It also brought me a little baby daughter called Daisy who sleeps very soundly and is a wonderful complement to her 3 brothers. I know what you’re thinking – Yes, We do have a telly, but the reception isn’t very good at times.
Back to business. Very busy here, companies obviously seeing data centre hosting as a more sensible way of reducing costs while still providing the services they need. It makes sense. Running kit in-house whilst meeting the business needs of more security and more availability is costly and a pain. Moving the kit to purpose built data centres that will ensure availability and security and still allow you the access you require seems to be the way forward for companies large and small.
Talking of Data Centres, loving this story which is on The Register but was on BBC site the day before... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/03/inverness_data/ which informs us of a super-eco data centre, placed in Inverness and will therefore use less power for its HVAC systems because it’s already blooming cold up there. Wonderful !
I guess it illustrates how competitive the Hosting market is that people have to come up with such mad ideas to differentiate themselves. What about taking the idea that one step further and put a data centre on Ben Nevis.... Obviously better connectivity to TheCloud up there....
PreviousComments on this post
Ryan, I was surfing for cloud computing and came across an interesting video from Microsoft http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-us&vid=b4d189d3-19bd-42b3-85d7-6ca46d97fe40 Microsoft doesnt seem to have picked up on your point that colder is better. There have been a number of articles in the press about Iceland bidding for the cloud market given the avalaibility of green, geothermal, energy and the cold climate minimising the need for HVAC My reading of cloud computing is that the cloud owner defines the infrastructure (h/w and s/w and managment processes) and provides these as a service - in contrast to a traditional datacentre when the customer typically defines the infrastructure. Is this how you see it?
Hi Alan, thanks for reading.
I've not commented before on Microsofts flat-bed-data-centre approach. To be honest, I wouldn't want my precious data anywhere near it - electric fence and all !. I'm concerned that there's not much thought gone into the security of it. I've got a Hotmail account - my details are on that truck somewhere !
The blog entry was a bit of light-hearted fun. I've been to Inverness a couple of times and it's very nice but not especially cold. I quite like the idea of a data centre there but for me the benefits would be that it's remote, secure and has hopefully great bandwidth. The company behind this is obviously looking to generate a bit of spin to stand out and get some interest. I would have looked into marketing this as a great DR centre, but that wouldn't have got this story half as much column inches.
The data centre we use in Slough gets its power from renewable Biomass energy which has a much reduced CO2 footprint. Using renewable power sources seems more sensible than relocating somewhere colder !
Cloud computing is exactly how you describe (to my way of thinking) Services which are consumed and not worrying about servers or tin anymore. As long as your data is secure and available then this should be a better way of working. Although most of our customers have their own bespoke applications or are reluctant to commit. Off the shelf services (email, CRM etc) should be an easier introduction. It's interesting times, dont you think?
Thanks for the video link.
