I am an Infrastructure-as-a -Service (IaaS) evangelist and having had the pleasure to work with Virtual Data Centre (VDC) during my time at Claranet, I can comprehensively say it is the future of hosting.
I often work with customers to build an ROI model, taking into account all the business benefits gained and all the costs saved.
Often they still turn to me and say:
‘For the same internal resource considered over a 3 year contract your VDC comes out twice as expensive as my on premise servers. I am not convinced all the other benefits are worth that much’
There are so many advantages to outsourcing your hosting requirement. Take a look at some of the benefits:
- OpEx rather than CapEx
- Elastic resource
- Enterprise grade hardware
- Named Tier 3 data centre environment
- High availability
- Low set up and maintenance costs
- 24/7 NOC monitoring and support
- Deployment via a user friendly portal
So, how do I convince you? I get technical and ask a few questions:
- What is the current/ expected utilisation of your on premise servers?
- What is the minimum server spec. you can buy, but what resource do you actually need to run the application?
- Do your resource requirements vary over a period, peaks and troughs over 12 months, like the retail and education sector?
Based on the above answers it usually transpires that customers can take between 25-75% less committed resource on VDC and use burst for the rest as required. By only deploying and using the resource you need at any given time VDC can cost you less than the on premise solution. Did I mention all the other benefits you get with VDC as well?
Mike Ridley