Data center administrators are faced with the challenge of what to do with
in-house versus cloud services. Following two years of lean spending on IT
infrastructure, the hype over cloud services has caught the attention of
everyone - from the C-suite to the functional leadership in organizations as
diverse as finance, marketing, logistics and operations. Providers like
Salesforce.com are tailoring their message not to the IT department but to
the CEO and CFO, promising cost savings, improved reliability and greater
business agility. IT leaders are presented with concepts of "indoor" or
"private" clouds.
Over those same two years, existing data center equipment is ripe for
replacement. Innovations in areas like virtualization, power optimization,
and multi-core processors coupled with increasing maintenance expenses are
providing an incentive for many enterprise org... (more)