ServiceMesh: What are the hidden costs and risks of cloud, and how do I mitigate them?”

This is a great question, and one that many of us in IT tend to minimize when adopting new and more efficient technologies. Sometimes the simple cost savings calculations distract us:

“If I can put twenty VM’s on one server and save $60K in overall cost of ownership compared to my previous environment, then I’m going to take that $60K.”

The above statement from an otherwise knowledgeable IT professional misses some key points. Here’s another example that might ring a bell from the past:
In 1995, it cost roughly $30K to buy a tower server from Compaq, HP, or IBM. We would put these servers in computer rooms and data centers and treat them like gold. After all, if you can only afford one or two of them, you’d better treat them very carefully. Then by the year 2000, servers and server prices had changed dramatically, and now you can buy four 1U servers for $6K each instead of one at $30K.

“Wow, now I have eight servers instead of two, just think how much more I can do? I can cut my costs, or better yet put even more applications in my data center for the same hardware cost.”

More of the Service Mesh post from Mark Thiele

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.