Where an electrical network is at low cost across a data network, there a data center can be born.
The effort to manage and develop IT solutions required by the business never stops; there is also the pace of technological innovations to consider. This makes a data center at risk of no sustainability, at least for small and medium-sized enterprises. In fact, the competitive pressure is enormous, the complexity is increasing and many enterprises can not be so efficient with their data center, because they are rightly focused on the core business, which is not the management of information technology.
But all enterprises nowadays are data driven, that is, the information is their guide for every decision that them have to take. They must assess their IT environment in order to calculate their productivity compared with that of providers of specialized outsourcing services. And here the problems begin for the small and medium entrepreneur.
In terms of energy, one should compare the efficiency of their date center with PUE (power usage effectiveness), a useful indicator for the purpose and here there is a video of Google’s explanation. In addition, we now have opportunity to improve the ratio of how much is actually consumed by IT with a better efficiency technique, called virtualization, a way to reduce the number of systems through an increased utilization of them.
Virtualization is born because the evolution of hardware, in terms of power and cost declining, is very strong (see Moore’s law) with respect to the evolution of software, which is very slow. In other words, if software increases its size more bugs could be inside, and it increases the time and cost of application development. There is therefore the need to bridge the gap between the hardware and software trends.
Virtualization fills this space. In computer terms virtualization makes “multi-tenant” a machine that was previously dedicated only to one operating system. To improve the productivity of people there is the automation, to reduce the need human intervention in case of repetitive actions.
Summing up, when companies have to decide whether to entrust to other IT suppliers must ask the following questions:
- Provide a service with growing volumes? [Governance]
- Fulfill quickly to requests? [Technology]
- IT must be always cost less? [Economics]
If the answers are all affirmative, then the IT operations is expected to exit the perimeter of the enterprise, because it is not sustainable and does not add direct value to the core business, on the contrary, if IT is a source of problems, it can subtracts value.
This post aims to demonstrate, after the necessary introduction of technical and economic concepts, that the more the datacenter becomes efficient the more we need it, and the appropriate delivery model is the public cloud. As said by the economist William Jevons a few centuries ago, when an asset improves its efficiency, we consume it more than before.
Example: At the beginning we needed 10 chips for run a job, now only one chip is sufficient, but since now we have 1,000 programs to be run, we need 100 chips. The moral is that the need for data center is increased, that is, the increase in IT activity is greater than that of efficiency from which it is derived. It’s already happened to energy. We have internal power supply only in case of necessity. Someone can affirm: but the data are vital, it is not the case like water or energy!
The answer that the future will give us likely is that the data are more protected by high specialized companies, rather than inside the walls.
PS: Consider the following metaphor: we gave to the banks what for us has more value: money. And despite the bad way in which they can use it, we let them because we did not have a better alternative: we could lose it or risk of it being stolen more easily if all the money is in our pockets.
