At the 2015 summit of the Open Compute Project (OCP), Amir Michael, a well-respected data-center engineer and a founder of OCP, offered a surprise during his presentation. “Something not often talked about in the industry,” Michael mentions. “There is a trend of people moving off the cloud.”
The purpose of Coolan, an analytics platform, is to help data-center operators reduce downtime and lower infrastructure costs by analyzing metadata on how the servers are performing.
“Trying to figure out the TCO (Total-Cost-of-Ownership) for your compute infrastructure is no easy task,” explains Michael. “With the proliferation of public, private, and hybrid clouds, not to mention the ever-growing number of Buzzword-as-a-Service paradigms, anyone in charge of their company’s infrastructure faces a difficult decision: Should you build or acquire your own data center, lease space in a co-located facility, or rent a piece of the cloud?”
Some of the cost points the TCO Model addresses include:
•Whether to build your own servers or buy OEM
•What type of hardware components to use
•Whether to upgrade systems or deploy new ones
•The cost of capital
•The data-center PUE
•The amount of power the network is consuming
And the ultimate question: stay in the cloud, go colo, or build a private data center?
•Managed services in the cloud wins if a company requires more computing power than storage.
•In a related sense, the amount of storage required has a huge impact on choosing a deployment method.
•The cost to grow is less for in-house data centers than cloud-managed services or leasing more colocation space.
