Amazon: Data centers are a pain in the SaaS
Are data centers worth the trouble?
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF — Tuesday, August 6 2007 at the Next Generation Data Center Conference, Amazon.com Chief Technology Officer, Werner Vogels lead off the event with a keynote outlining why he hates data centers.
According to Vogels, IT trade rags are telling you how cool and exciting data centers are, with examples of high profile companies investing vast amounts of time, money and intellectual effort into engineering them.
The elephant in the room, according to Vogels, is that building data centers requires technologists and engineering staff to spend 70% of their efforts on undifferentiated heavy lifting.
Vogels suggests companies use their staff for building things that can differentiate them from competitors, rather than banging their heads against the oftentimes frustrating, unprofitable business of data center infrastructure maintenance.
Vogels used the recent generator failure at hosting company 365 Main as an example, explaining that even the best data center infrastructure plans fall through. He noted the complexity of UPS systems, data center fire suppression and cooling — and asked the audience why a company would want to be responsible for maintaining such sophisticated equipment and systems that have nothing to do with distributing their products.
“And we haven’t even talked about bandwidth. Network is this dirty little secret,” Vogels said. “If you run big data centers, you worry — can I get enough bandwidth going out of our data centers? Data centers are not only limited by the number of servers you can get in them, but by the bandwidth you can get out.”
After your infrastructure is set up, what about the servers themselves? “You will lose 8-10% of your disks per year — given” Vogels said. “You won’t lose your data, but your performance goes down the drain. Every year, you will be replacing 4,000 disks. You never knew that when you decided to start running your company.”
Having to manage multiple data centers is a true pain, according to Vogels. And you can forget about trying to scale these things.
Vogels’ presentation devolved into a blatant pitch for Amazon’s new SaaS products. But he raised an interesting question — are data centers worth the trouble? Daniel Golding, an analyst at Tier 1 Research, recently said only 50 global businesses — mainly in financial and Internet services — would build their own data centers while everyone else will outsource the task in the future.
Let me know what you think in the comments section.
Posted: August 10th, 2007 under Managing data center outsourcing services.
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Pingback by Amazon: Data centers are a pain in the SaaS « FR Test Blog — August 13, 2007 @ 10:52 am
Vogels is right that data center management is a pain in the rear, but Golding is wrong about companies outsourcing them. Some will, especially smaller companies, but the risks inherent in that loss of control are pretty high. It’s one thing for a 500 person company to say “vendor x hosts our datacenter, and so takes care of y and z compliance issues”, but that won’t fly with larger enterprises. Just because the data resides in someone else’s hands doesn’t mean that the company is no longer responsible for it, it means that they have to manage their own internal compliance as well as that of the vendor.
Some may move to a managed services sort of model for the physical aspect of the datacenter, and that might work out a little better, but that’s a time and materials based business model, and won’t end up being much cheaper in the long run. Especially for huge enterprises with hundreds of systems staff members, and thousands of systems, that can afford the luxury of dedicated NOC techs.
Consequently, I disagree strongly with the notion that only 50 or so will retain their own datacenters.
Comment by 0/0 — August 13, 2007 @ 4:18 pm
[…] Hovsepian’s keynote focused, as I said, on the expansion of Linux. He used phrases like “vendor neutral” to describe his ideas, and never once implied that Novell (or Microsoft) should be the one driving the ideas he put forth. Unlike many of the LinuxWorld keynotes last week, Novell’s was refreshingly lacking many of the self-aggrandizing remarks that plagued those of eBay and Amazon.com. Note to Amazon — we get it, you have a new SaaS initiative coming out, thanks for the advertisement for it in the middle of your keynote. Novell’s keynote did see a product pitch or two, as Hovsepian took some time in the middle there to gush about ZENWorks. It seemed out of place in a keynote full of general ideas about expanding Linux, but that doesn’t mean we should ax the entire speech en masse. Aside from his moment of ZEN, Hovsepian seemed to be about promoting ways to take Linux past the enterprise success it’s enjoyed for the past five years or so. Linux is mission critical, sure, but there now exists the danger of complacency both with its developers and its corporate handlers. […]
Pingback by How to expand Linux in two styles: Red Hat vs. Novell — Enterprise Linux Log — August 15, 2007 @ 9:55 am
[…] The trouble is, the big guys also have a point. To paraphrase a particular blog title, “Data centers are a pain in the SaaS”. They are a pain in the Web 2.0 too. Or, as Amazon.com Chief Technology Officer, Werner Vogels said, “Building data centers requires technologists and engineering staff to spend 70% of their efforts on undifferentiated heavy lifting.” […]
Pingback by How Does Virtualization Impact Hosting Providers? (A Secret Blueprint for Web Hosting World Domination) « SmoothSpan Blog — August 16, 2007 @ 6:06 pm