There’s an old set of tradeoffs between buying services or “doing it yourself,” where it comes to computing or communications infrastructure. Hosted VoIP virtually always makes more sense than buying systems for a smaller business. But premises-based solutions typically are more economical for large enterprises.

Something of the same argument can be when companies or people choose between cloud computing services and building their own data centers. Obviously, large enterprises often justify building their own data centers. Others might be able to justify renting space in somebody else’s data center. Smaller organizations might well find that renting computing cycles is the better choice.

Google Sr. Manager, Production Network Engineering and Architecture at Google argues that the decision is highly dependent on duty cycle. Steady, predictable loads, especially at a high rate of utilization, will tip economics in favor of self-operated or co-located facilities. Highly-variable demand, and low volume, will tend to tip the economics in favor of a cloud computing solution.

“Think of it as taking a taxi vs. buying a car to make a trip between San Francisco and Palo Alto,” says Gill. “If you only make the trip once a quarter, it is cheaper to take a taxi.” But “if you make the trip every day, then you are better off buying a car.”

“The difference is the duty cycle. If you are running infrastructure with a duty cycle of 100 percent, it may make sense to run in-house,” says Gill. The detailed assumptions and analysis are here  http://ow.ly/315qD

The coming data tsunami (aka ‘Big Data) threatens to swamp enterprises that are ill-prepared to manage and analyze massive data sets. Indeed even terms used to describe the quantity of data – gigabytes and terabyes, are rapidly giving way to petabyte, exabytes, and zetabytes (1 ZB = 10²¹ bytes). Petaflop/exaflop computing processing speeds and storage technologies are enabling companies to explore new business models such as in Life Sciences with genomics and personalized drug dosing.

A multitude of information technologies are increasingly used by CIOs in efforts to stay afloat in a sea of data. For example, Enterprise Data Warehouse solutions (EDW) have become major growth businesses for firms like Teradata. In the past year, cloud services and distributed computing technologies offer enterprises an ability to leverage scalable compute and storage resources on a virtualized basis to help address this issue. With cloud-based storage and compute services, the notion of owning IT infrastructure (i.e., servers and data centers) may seem quaint if not somewhat bizarre in coming years. Yet with all the promise of cloud computing, looming large as a potential barrier are performance inadequacies of typical enterprise networks and public internet connections. These networks lack sufficient bandwidth to fully unleash the true potential of cloud computing technology. Read More Now

The federal government has begun what looms as the largest data center consolidation in history, hoping to dramatically reduce IT operations that are currently distributed among more than 1,100 data centers.

On Friday Federal CIO Vivek Kundra outlined details of the ambitious plan in a memo that directs federal agencies to prepare an inventory of the IT assets by April 30 and develop a preliminary data center consolidation plan by June 30. These plans will need to be finalized by Dec. 31, 2010, with implementation beginning in 2011.

Huge Implications for Data Center Sector
The government data center consolidation has huge implications for the fortunes of system integrators, data center service providers (especially in northern Virginia), and cloud computing platforms optimized for hosting government apps.

The consolidation effort figures to generate significant business for companies providing energy efficiency tools and consulting, as Kundra signaled that reducing energy costs will be a driving force in the effort. He noted that the number of government data centers soared from 432 in 1999 to the current 1,100 plus.

“This growth in redundant infrastructure investments is costly, inefficient and unsustainable and has a significant impact on energy consumption,” said Kundra. “In 2006 Federal servers and data centers consumed 6 billion kwH of electricity, and without a fundamental shift in how we deploy technology it could reach 12 billion kwH by 2012.”

First Assessment Due April 30
The immediate challenge: Federal agencies must conduct a “high-level assessment” of all their IT assessments and data centers by April 30, followed by a more detailed accounting by July 30.

In announcing the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative, Kundra outlined four high-level goals:

* Promote the use of Green IT by reducing the overall energy and real estate footprint of government data centers;
* Reduce the cost of data center hardware, software and operations;
* Increase the overall IT security posture of the government;
* Shift IT investments to more efficient computing platforms and technologies.

That last bullet point is boosting expectations that a meaningful chunk of government IT operations will be shifted to a cloud computing model. Kundra discussed this prospect at an appearance Friday, saying the federal government is looking for “game-changing approaches” to deal with the problematic growth in data centers rather than “brute force consolidation.”

“This is a huge opportunity to apply best practices from the private sector,” Kundra told Federal Computer Week. “It is a huge problem. The path we are on does not make sense.”

Likely to Boost Data Center Demand
But the cloud model won’t make sense for all federal applications. If recent consolidations by companies like HP and Intel are any indication, the drive for greater efficiency will render many of the current data center properties obsolete. Many older data facilities do not have the power capacity to support a highly-utilized equipment space. Consolidation also leads to higher densities, which are more difficult to cool in legacy facilities.

That means new data center space, most likely in northern Virginia and Maryland. Systems integrators and companies building cloud platforms have been among the players driving demand for data center space in northern Virginia, where demand has been strong and new supply has been limited. As the federal consolidation moves ahead, that demand is likely to increase as federal agencies identify new requirements.

The federal consolidation is also likely to be good news for server vendors, as consolidations usually include hardware refreshes to take advantage of the latest advances in computing power and energy efficiency.

In the beginning, data centers were giant buildings housing a single, vacuum tube‐driven computer, tended to by people in white lab coats whose main job was changing the tubes as they burned out. Today’s data centers are so much more complicated that it’s likecompletely different industry: We notonly have dozens or hundreds or even thousands of servers to worry about, but now we’re starting to outsource  specifc services—like email,  spam filtering, or customer relationship management (CRM)—to Web‐based companies  selling “Software as a Service (SaaS)” in “the cloud.” How do we manage it all, to ensure that all of our IT assets are  delivering the performance and service that our businesses need? Download Now

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