In case you’re in IT, you in all probability bear in mind the primary time you walked into an actual knowledge heart—not only a server closet, however an precise raised-floor knowledge heart, the place the door wooshes open in a blast of chilly air and noise and also you’re confronted with rows and rows of racks, monolithic and grey, stuffed filled with servers with cooling followers screaming and blinkenlights blinking like mad. The info heart is the place the cool stuff is—the pizza packing containers, the blade servers, the NASes and the SANs. A few of its residents are extra unique—the Massive Iron in all its large types, from Z-series to Superdome and all factors in between.
For many years, knowledge facilities have been the beating hearts of many companies—the fortified secret rooms the place big quantities of capital sit, busily remodeling electrical energy into income. And so they’re generally a spot for IT to cover, too—it is form of a standing joke that at any time when a person you do not need to see is stalking across the IT flooring, your greatest guess to keep away from contact is simply to badge into the info heart and await them to go away. (However, uh, I by no means did that ever. I promise.)
However the previous couple of years have seen an enormous shift within the relationship between corporations and their knowledge—and the locations the place that knowledge lives. Positive, it is all the time handy to personal your personal servers and storage, however why tie up all that capital when you do not have to? Why not simply go to the cloud buffet and pay for what you need to eat and nothing extra?
There’ll all the time be some cause for some corporations to have knowledge facilities—the cloud, for all its attractiveness, cannot fairly do every little thing. (Not but, a minimum of.) However the listing of objections to going off-premises in your computing wants is quickly shrinking—and we will discuss a bit about what comes subsequent.
The occasion has concluded! Thanks for everybody who contributed questions.
