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.