
fails, someone has to remove the old drive from the server, manage the RMA,
*
and put
the new drive into the server. That takes time and skill, and it all needs to happen in a
timely fashion to prevent a complete failure of the server.
What happens when there is a disaster?
If an entire server goes down, unless you are in a high-availability infrastructure, you have
a disaster on your hands and your team needs to rush to address the situation. Hopefully,
you have solid backups in place and a strong disaster recovery plan to get things
operational ASAP. This process is almost certainly manual.
Don’t need that server anymore?
Perhaps your capacity needs are not what they used to be, or perhaps the time has come
to decommission a fully depreciated server. What do you do with that old server? Even if
you give it away, someone has to take the time to do something with that server. And if
the server is not fully depreciated, you are incurring company expenses against a machine
that is not doing anything for your business.
What about real estate and electricity?
When you run your own infrastructure (or even if you have a rack at an ISP), you may
be paying for real estate and electricity that are largely unused. That’s a very ungreen
thing, and it is a huge waste of money.
None of these issues are concerns with a proper cloud infrastructure:
• You add capacity into a cloud infrastructure the minute you need it, and not a moment
sooner. You don’t have any capital expense associated with the allocation, so you don’t
have to worry about the timing of capacity needs with budget needs. Finally, you can be
up and running with new capacity in minutes, and thus look good even when you get
caught with your pants down.
• You don’t worry about any of the underlying hardware, ever. You may never even know
if the physical server you have been running on fails completely. And, with the right tools,
you can automatically recover from the most significant disasters while your team is
asleep.
• When you no longer need the same capacity or you need to move to a different virtual
hardware configuration, you simply deprovision your server. You do not need to dispose
of the asset or worry about its environmental impact.
• You don’t have to pay for a lot of real estate and electricity you never use. Because you
are using a fractional portion of a much beefier piece of hardware than you need, you are
maximizing the efficiency of the physical space required to support your computing needs.
Furthermore, you are not paying for an entire rack of servers with mostly idle CPU cycles
consuming electricity.
*
Return merchandise authorization. When you need to return a defective part, you generally have to go
through some vendor process for returning that part and obtaining a replacement.
C LO UD C OM PU TI NG 5