Software-Defined Data Centers Might Cost Companies More Than They Save 173
storagedude writes "As more and more companies move to virtualized, or software-defined, data centers, cost savings might not be one of the benefits. Sure, utilization rates might go up as resources are pooled, but if the end result is that IT resources become easier for end users to access and provision, they might end up using more resources, not less. That's the view of Peder Ulander of Citrix, who cites the Jevons Paradox, a 150-year-old economic theory that arose from an observation about the relationship between coal efficiency and consumption. Making a resource easier to use leads to greater consumption, not less, says Ulander. As users can do more for themselves and don't have to wait for IT, they do more, so more gets used. The real gain, then, might be that more gets accomplished as IT becomes less of a bottleneck. It won't mean cost savings, but it could mean higher revenues."
IT the bottleneck? (Score:5, Funny)
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Cost savings are irrelevant when the data centre operators are outright price-gouging.
The world’s largest tech companies have failed to justify their Australian pricing regimes, with a 12-month government inquiry into the matter finding that Australians pay more for products for little to no legitimate reason. In a report, the committee found that Australians pay anywhere between 50 to 100 per cent more for IT-related goods than our overseas counterparts.
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/news/2013/7/29/technology/it-price-inquiry-spells-out-australia-tax [businessspectator.com.au]
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Well, it's not the IT people, rather the Information Technology part.
Sorry, but frequently its the people.
- Its those people that are in IT because its a career that will earn them a living rather than because they have a gift for it.
- Its those people that blindly follow rules because they only know how, they don't now why.
- Its those people who only have round peg and try to use it to fill every hole whatever the shape.
- Its those people that decide to implement things from scratch rather than build on experience gathered elsewhere.
- Its those people that are more concerne
Re:IT the bottleneck? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. That doesn't mean that it's IT's fault. At my current workplace, we have 150+ people, and 2 IT people. Getting stuff through IT is slow. However, the problem isn't with IT - they don't get to set their own budget.
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At my current workplace, we have 150+ people, and 2 IT people
As time marches on, people are becoming more IT literate and IT is becoming more people literate. In 20 years, those 2 IT people will be sitting in the basement playing Halo 16 justifying their existence by requiring a backup person to hold the passwords for the network infrastructure.
Re:IT the bottleneck? (Score:5, Insightful)
As time marches on, people are becoming more IT literate
Hahahaha
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect [wikipedia.org]
Re:IT the bottleneck? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:IT the bottleneck? (Score:4, Interesting)
I can give you a counter example. We had a Cloud Ops team that had the task to exactly prevent this stuff you described.
Great. Except, they didn't even know how to set an EC2 instance with EBS. Also they couldn't provide the EC2 instance types that were needed.
So in the end, we just worked around them. Instead of taking *days* to explain them what we needed, we had our EC2 instance running in 5min exactly how we needed it.
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I can give you a counter example. We had a Cloud Ops team that had the task to exactly prevent this stuff you described. Great. Except, they didn't even know how to set an EC2 instance with EBS. Also they couldn't provide the EC2 instance types that were needed. So in the end, we just worked around them. Instead of taking *days* to explain them what we needed, we had our EC2 instance running in 5min exactly how we needed it.
Whoever picked/assigned that team failed, because the "team" obviously lacked the skill set required to do the job, just like the developer in GP's example lacked those skills. That's and argument for better training, but hardly an argument for placing the management of IT resources in the hands of end users.
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When I set up a AWS based system for part of reed Elsevier I made damm sure that I was only running the services I needed and I locked it down so that only people coming from our ip could access the web side of the system. And both I and My manger kept a strict eye on what we where spending on AWS.
Ideally I woudl have liked to lock it Down further with ssl certs to secure the link between my s
Re:IT the bottleneck? (Score:4, Insightful)
They are becoming just IT literate enough to be a problem.
Any idiot can set up their own department server now. But that idiot won't know how to configure firewall rules, stop unneeded services or make sure patches are up-to-date.
Any idiot can move their data around on USB sticks and dropbox - and this will greatly increase productivity, as they subvert the frustrating demands of IT to keep all confidential data within the office and start catching-up at home and on the commute too. Until someone loses the stick or has their laptop stolen, leaving half your customer database floating around the street somewhere.
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Our company moved to Microsoft Cloud, and user rates plummeted. Everything became uselessly slow, the good spreadsheets can't even be opened by cloud services, the app forces you into the online Outlookwhich is better performed by the local ap, data limits are sometimes a bottleneck, and basically we ended up using it for end-of-the-week backup.
To get things done, we depend on email and thumbdirves.
Oh, and we fired our IT guy, and then started paying him as a contractor.
So we are experiencing the opposite o
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The problem is that the IT dept is becoming less IT literate...
The industry has expanded very rapidly, and demand for skilled people has massively outpaced demand. This is then coupled with vendors who try to claim their products don't require highly skilled staff to manage them.
Also as you point out, people are becoming more IT literate but this can be dangerous, as these people often think they know a lot more than they really do and are prone to breaking things. These are also the kind of people who try
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I can setup a server. I don't want to. I don't want to manage a server. To keep up with updates. To deal with issues. To read up on standards. To setup firewall rules.
Also, it'd take me five times as long to create a server that is half as reliable as one done by a proper sys admin who does nothing but that all day. That's time I'm not doing my job and that's time I'm basically being overpaid a lot to be a shitty sys admin.
Fuck that.
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Yes. That doesn't mean that it's IT's fault. At my current workplace, we have 150+ people, and 2 IT people. Getting stuff through IT is slow. However, the problem isn't with IT - they don't get to set their own budget.
What do they do all day? Browse slashdot?!
I just left a company where we had 2.5 (one was part time) doing I.T for 1,300 users! I left because users had to wait 10+ days to get a response sometimes and always yelled at me while I worked for free off the clock not to get fired.
If we can handle this with an average response time of 7 business days then why can't your company do so with 1/10 the demands? ... maybe I should ask where you work as I could be relieved not to have ulcers?
Re:IT the bottleneck? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you had a response time of a week for issues, and you had to work enough unpaid overtime that you left rather than facing an intolerable work situation then quite obviously you were not able to handle it with the staffing at hand.
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Probably depends on the nature of the business.
Some types are business are inherently more IT dependent than others.
At least, once upon a time I contracted to/ in an industrial factory making insulation.
The permanent IT staff was 7 for a workforce of around 1200 .. and most of those were dedicated to the production control systems in the plant (ancient honeywell machines).
Most of the workers were union tradesmen .. whom responded to the new email system training materials was to circular file them before I
Re:IT the bottleneck? (Score:4)
If we can handle this with an average response time of 7 business days then why can't your company do so with 1/10 the demands? ... maybe I should ask where you work as I could be relieved not to have ulcers?
Yeah, waiting a week to get an expired password reset is precisely what I mean when I say going through IT is slow.
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Yeah, waiting a week to get an expired password reset is precisely what I mean when I say going through IT is slow.
So the obvious solution then, is to allow users to reset their own passwords. Right? Who needs an "administrator" for the access control system? Just give all the users the admin passwords. Right?
Obviously, that's an absurd suggestion, but you've offered nothing in the way of a solution to the problem you describe. Hell, you have not even offered a half-assed analysis of why it takes so long for a password reset. I have not seen things so bad that it took a week to get that done, but I have seen it take
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Obviously, that's an absurd suggestion, but you've offered nothing in the way of a solution to the problem you describe. Hell, you have not even offered a half-assed analysis of why it takes so long for a password reset. I have not seen things so bad that it took a week to get that done, but I have seen it take hours.
How the hell would I know? I'm not in the IT department - I'm a user on that system. Moreover, it's a windows environment, which I have no knowledge nor interest in. I have no idea, nor do I care. If you expect your users to perform a systemic analysis of your IT department to determine why the turn around time is so long, methinks you're expecting too much.
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That's right, bring the headcount down so that it's two weeks to respond instead.
Or try the cloud - a week for MS to fix one of their typos in DNS at one of their hosted MS Exchange farms so that a customer with more than sixteen thousand email users could start getting email again. Formerly intolerable queue lengths to get stuff done are the norm in some places due to mismanagement - low headcount is considered more important than customer service.
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It all depends on how long the queue of tasks is and what the policy is doesn't it? In the badly run places people are writing about the guy doing the reset doesn't even find out about the task for a week. There's no point blaming the poor sods at the blunt end of such a mess. You have to find an arse a bit higher up the tree to kick when something has gone that far wrong.
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Re:IT the bottleneck? (Score:5, Interesting)
A car analogy:
This is the same type of BS that the city I live in uses so they don't have to build or expand any roads, "Well, traffic will just be as bad even after we get the highway built, so why bother?"
It's true. Once they build a new highway into town, people will build houses farther away on the other end of the expanded highway, so the new highway just fuels more suburban sprawl, so it causes more congestion inside the city and for drivers closer to the city where it may not be possible to build more roads at all. Or, in areas without a major population center, it can encourage job centers to spring up along the highway, which is difficult to serve with cost effective transit as people are forced to commute farther and farther to get to their jobs.
By not building the roads, they implicitly encourage more high density, transit friendly development closer to the city.
In general, a new highway is a temporary (and expensive) solution to a traffic problem.
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Yah, and 5 seconds tells you there is a difference between building a giant highway going into the farmland and adding a few extra lanes to a road running through the middle of downtown.
The former is actually pretty easy/inexpensive, while the latter is expensive and difficult. Yet, the former actually gets done all the time, even though it actually makes the traffic worse.
The worse part is "encouraging" alternative methods of transport really don't work until they hit critical mass. All over the southern a
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Re:IT the bottleneck? (Score:4, Insightful)
Someone once said that Europeans view time the way Americans view distance; 50 years is nothing to one, 50 miles is nothing to the other.
It's not always possible to cycle and still be productive at the other end.
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The one thing I've never seen the studies address is why people have a high tolerance for traffic, and why they will go to their tolerance edge. What reason would they have, and why does nobody ever address that?
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It's probably not a single factor. Cost (gas, wear and tear, etc) and commute time probably combine on one side against cost-of-living and quality of life on the other. At some point, you look at what your car is costing you in dollars and time and emit a "fuck that" and move. On the other side, you watch each of your neighbors' houses get broken into and see your schools declining and emit a "fuck that" and move, putting up with a bit more of a commute. The balance is probably a little bit different for ea
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Nope. More roads doesn't push people out. More roads let people buy cheaper land. The problem is land price, not roads. If downtown houses were as large and cheap as those 40 miles away, then nobody would sprawl. Fix the housing availability, and you fix traffic. But no, we get the anti-road nazis demanding bad traffic to punish those who choose cars, and no solution to someone who wants a 3-bedroom house with a yard large enough for a trampoline in a good school zone. Just make them change their minds by crippling the schools and transportation system until they live 5 to a room near work as the only way to survive.
God bless the 3rd world we call the USA.
Desirable land is desirable... Get used to it, there is no "fix" for every one downtown wanting a huge house on half an acre. Have you noticed how rarely it is that new land is produced? And how often it is that new greedy d-bags are produced? You can hopefully infer that this will be happening from now until forever.
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Desirable land is desirable... Get used to it, there is no "fix" for every one downtown wanting a huge house on half an acre.
You must have missed the point. The point is "people hate bringing up families in tiny inner-city apartments in horrible school zones" and the "fix" for that is making traffic so bad that they hate an affordable house in a good neighborhood even more. The "fix" is worse than the problem. The problem is the planners and anti-road-Nazis seeking to punish people who would give up their time to provide for their family. The people working on the problem are trying to make it worse. That's the problem.
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If downtown houses were as large and cheap as those 40 miles away, then nobody would sprawl.
This probably depends on your city. I'm in Philly, where downtown housing is plentiful and cheap, but the schools suck hard. People like me live just outside the city limits so that we don't have to put our kids in private school. Once you are in the suburbs, you are correct - housing is cheaper further out.
I suggest changing the way we fund schools to address this, though funding is hardly the biggest problem that Philly schools face. Someone needs to fire every single person in the district and start fres
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bastardized version of a 15 year old shell script that you've been using since they wrote it in their first year out of college
That's exactly what puppet gives you, only you also have to remember another tedious infrastructure that's out of your control and constrains what you can do.
Some of these tools are really just resume-fillers. Any sysadmin worth anything has always done centralised automation.
Re:IT the bottleneck? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, IT's the bottleneck. Why? Because users who roll their own solution without understanding what they're creating will create a fragile business model.
Andy Accountant decides to do General Ledger on Quickbooks, while Polly Payables decides to do billing on the bank's web server. How does one update the other? It starts out as a manual process. But let's say Polly is clever and signs up for IFTTT.com to automate the integration. She also hands the task of entering the bills over to Carlos Clerical. Later, when Polly is on vacation, Andy downloads an upgrade to Quickbooks - but IFTTT was set up only to modify the original Quickbooks. Now Polly's billing doesn't work, and Carlos has no idea what's going on. Polly is the only support person, but she's on vacation. Andy only knows about the manual processes, so he can't help Carlos. So the bills don't get paid.
And the IT guy only knows about the PCs, the printers, the network, and the file server. He doesn't know about the apps, because the users got tired of waiting for him and rolled their own.
Repeat this scene for each and every system, service, and person involved with computers in the organization. It starts out easy and fast, but the dependencies quickly crust over every activity the company performs. Support becomes a nightmare, and changes go from "difficult" to "impossible".
If the IT guy put the pieces together, he (should) document the connections, provide troubleshooting knowledge, and at least know who to call for support. At least that's the theory.
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I'm not disputing anything you say about the slowness of the project process, or even the potentially corrupt selection process. It can take years for an IT shop to make some of those simple ideas happen. And that doesn't say anything about the size of the shop, either. Even a large well-staffed shop can take many months just to get a new project on their priority list, let alone completed.
Did anyone look at Polly's solution to figure out the ROI, or if it is worth the risk? Did she save $20 of labor pe
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I've got the middle on line one. It's pretty pissed off about being excluded.
Re:IT the bottleneck? (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is that a TB of enterprise class storage (and backup) isn't $100.
Re:IT the bottleneck? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yah, and that is why the "cloud" providers are less expensive. Do you really think there is a 7 figure EMC sitting behind an amazon storage node?
No! see apples to oranges again. For some reason its ok, for the cloud provider to run on cheezy hardware missing most of the "enterprise" features, but its not OK for random company to buy similar hardware.
Re:IT the bottleneck? (Score:5, Informative)
Yah, and that is why the "cloud" providers are less expensive. Do you really think there is a 7 figure EMC sitting behind an amazon storage node?
No! see apples to oranges again. For some reason its ok, for the cloud provider to run on cheezy hardware missing most of the "enterprise" features, but its not OK for random company to buy similar hardware.
Companies want to see the big Netapp or EMC name on the array so they can trust that the manufacturer knows what they are doing enough that their data is safe. Amazon and Google can get away with using cheap commodity hardware because they *are* the big name, and people trust that they can keep their data safe, so they don't need to turn around and buy hardware from the big storage vendors.
Are cloud providers really much cheaper? An entry level Netapp FAS2240 with 12TB of disk costs around $16K [computerworld.com]
Amazon charges $0.095/GB/month, or $1140/month for 12TB. So after 14 months on Amazon, you could have bought a local array.
You still have to back up (or replicate) the data from the local array, so that's not a true apples-to-apples comparison (assuming that you trust S3 enough that you don't keep your own backup of the data). a 12TB array is pretty small so you don't get much economy of scale, so once you get into the larger arrays with 100's of TB, I think the numbers swing farther away from S3 for corporate storage.
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a 12TB array is pretty small so you don't get much economy of scale, so once you get into the larger arrays with 100's of TB, I think the numbers swing farther away from S3 for corporate storage.
Although some things get cheaper when you buy more (floor and rack space utilized better, administration cost lower per TB, etc.), pretty much everything else is linear.
Although where I work isn't in the NSA or Google realm, we do buy disk space in close to petabyte chunks, and you really only get about a 20% break at best with that kind of volume. It's still around $1K/TB for slower disk, $2-4K/TB for fast disk, and $10K/TB for SSD.
Re:IT the bottleneck? (Score:5, Interesting)
But, keeping three copies of the data on cheap hardware, one of which is hundreds of miles away and having a couple other data centers to which the data migrates in seconds and minutes is within the scope of a cloud provider -- just business as usual (the exact number of data centers and copies is irrelevant as they depend on this years stats for the low cost hardware - it's all statistics).
A business whose business isn't to maintain ten(s) of data centers and manage them for redundancy may not be willing (nor, probably, should they) to pay for that level of redundancy just for their own ten terabytes of important data (their business is making innovative widgets efficiently, not managing geographically distributed data centers, each with a connection to at least two independent power sources plus backup generators).
If a midsized business making drywall needed another car to transport a sale person, would they build an auto plant to build that car? No, they would lease the car from a business whose business was leasing cars (and providing replacement cars and maintenance) and who, in turn, bought them from a specialist in designing and making cars (Toyota for example).
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If a midsized business making drywall needed another car to transport a sale person, would they build an auto plant to build that car?
A bit over the top. Better comparision would be between buying the car and leasing the car.
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For some reason its ok, for the cloud provider to run on cheezy hardware missing most of the "enterprise" features, but its not OK for random company to buy similar hardware.
There's no mystery here - when the system breaks, as it inevitably will, the IT department can blame the failure on the cloud provider rather than on themselves.
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There's no mystery here - when the system breaks, as it inevitably will, the IT department can blame the failure on the cloud provider rather than on themselves.
Doesn't matter. IT is still on the hook. Who recommended, evaluated, configured, specced out, configured, managed, the storage vendor? If IT was involved we still are on the hook for fixing the problem. Except with everything in the cloud we have no control and no access. All we can do is cajole or abuse the provider until it is fixed.
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The other problem from my perspective as a user is archiving. My IT department will archive files for 7 years, but I have no way to search the archives so I just keep it all on the network drive. I can't believe that there isn't and index-then-archive service out there. Now that I type this, it seems absurd, and my IT department must just not know about it.
Anyway, the result is that I use many gigabytes worth of network storage with data that is really old and probably useless unless we get named in a paten
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The problem is that a TB of enterprise class storage (and backup) isn't $100.
It's this attitude that has a bunch of crappy USB drives sitting on so many of my co-workers desks.
That same drive could be sitting in the data center, where it could get backed up. Sure it wouldn't be as reliable as enterprise class stuff, but it's a lot better than it sitting on someone's desk where it can be swiped or lost in a disaster. You could set up a FreeBSD zfs system for a couple hundred dollars plus time that would serve dozens of these guys. It could back up to another such system at another si
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Just so all parties know the risks involved, it's all good.
Yeah, that's the problem. Once IT owns it, they're also the ones that take the blame when it fails; known risk factors don't make a bit of difference to the scapegoat when data is lost.
Therefore the scapegoat buys the most reliable storage it can afford.
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All you have to do is CYA. Lay out the tradeoffs in a meeting, make people agree in writing, and move on with life. Sure you'll take heat when a drive drops off the network - that's your job to fix it. But you can always say, look, give me xxx dollars and I can make this problem 10x less likely going forward. They will probably agree that you all made the right tradeoff decision the first time, or they will have to agree that you need more money.
If your place of employment is not rational, then you will pro
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Good old corporate Ego getting in the way of running business again.
When ever I hear the word Enterprise class, I tend to cringe, as an MBA myself, the term Enterprise class means, It is more expensive, so you should think it is that much better.
If they let their egos aside. And really look objectively at the specs you tend to find a bell curve in quality. The "enterprise class stuff" tends to be 1 Standard Deviation better in quality. However it price is exponentially higher. It is often cheaper to ge
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I'm sure that's what my company was thinking when they bought low level un-managed switches for our office.
Then someone created loop when plugging in a router. Stupid switch couldn't detect it and couldn't be remotely managed. We had no network for 2 days as the IT guy had to be flown in to figure it out. Forty people basically doing nothing for 8 hours and barely doing anything for another 8. Including the sales staff who couldn't do demos. I'm sure you you can do the math on how much that cost with that M
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Well be sure not to get the Cheap stuff as well. There is a sweet spot in the middle where you get the best bang for the buck.
That said if you have external backups and you mission critical of some data isn't that high where you need it now always. You probably could get by with using cheap stuff and restore from backup if it fails, sure it may take a day to get it back out. But information such as financials information doesn't need to be there all the time for most organizations. But there within a few
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The problem is that a TB of enterprise class storage (and backup) isn't $100.
Damn straight. Too bad that all too many users and PHB's forget that adjective and it's importance. Don't get me wrong. I love "the cloud" and it's economy (among it's many virtues) but to assume that this or that commodity service is a good fit for a system that is engineered to meet the security, availability, and management demands of this or that business is just plain stupid.
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Here's why IT doesn't use those 100 buck 1TB hard drives: http://serverfault.com/questions/263694/why-is-enterprise-storage-so-expensive/263695#263695 [serverfault.com]
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That's a crowd sourced answer written like someone is trying to convince an IT manager to spend more on storage. The correct answer is more mundane and dystopian. "because they can." There is no other reason. If they couldn't, they wouldn't, but they can so they do. Home drives are good enough for most enterprise use, and see wide use at Google and Amazon. If the enterprise SAS were so much better, why are so many doing what they can to move away from them?
Maybe I've been travelling in the wrong circles, but I haven't run across a case where access to hardware was a serious bottleneck since mainframes stopped being the center of the universe and "DP" became "IT".
The real bottleneck always seems to be software. Specifically, software that is customized to the needs of the customer. And that customization is going to take as long and cost as much regardless of who owns the hardware or where the hardware is located on (or off) the planet.
Well, more accurately, y
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Here's why IT doesn't use those 100 buck 1TB hard drives
For tier 3 storage, you will see 1TB drives at close to $100 in commercial storage, although they will likely be the higher end drives (like WD RE4, etc.).
And low-calorie foods cause obesity (Score:3, Insightful)
Because when people read the label and see that the food is lower calorie or "more healthy"; they eat a larger amount of the food because they feel less guilty due to it being "more healthy"; and the additional consumption more than offsets the decrease in calorie count of the "healthier food"
So eating lower calorie foods makes you less healthy....
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As with your calorie example, you won't end up with more work being "accomplished".
You'll end up with more fat.
Look! I can record HD video and upload it to the data center and then embed it in my Power Point presentation and then email it to everyone as an attachment. With just a few clicks. Instantly.
Right now most o
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No kidding (Score:2)
Not a 1:1 ratio (Score:5, Insightful)
Virtualization makes it easier to stand up a new "server." True.
This simplicity will lead to using more "servers." Granted.
But those virtual servers require far less hardware than the old physical servers. Many of these virtual servers are used only a small percentage of the time. Depending on the load, 10, 20, or even more servers can run on one physical piece of hardware.
So even if we use, say, five times more "servers" with virtualization, we will be using fewer physical units--fewer "resources."
In short, the math is not so simple.
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There are other variables as well. If the servers have disk images stored on deduplicated backend filesystems that have autotiering, the hypervisor is able to swap to a dedicated fast disk or SSD and swap the VM out if unused, then adding another VM might take very little in physical resources.
What is happening is that because VMs are easier to create, modify and archive, it allows developers to spin up new boxes as opposed to adding more tasks to existing hardware or VMs. Is this good? Possibly. It is
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VMs will eventually provide what Java always promised. Write once run anywhere, because the entire OS is encapsulated within the VM and not just the development environment. Java is still likely to even be a big part of this.
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Virtualization makes it easier to stand up a new "server." True.
This simplicity will lead to using more "servers." Granted.
But those virtual servers require far less hardware than the old physical servers. Many of these virtual servers are used only a small percentage of the time. Depending on the load, 10, 20, or even more servers can run on one physical piece of hardware.
So even if we use, say, five times more "servers" with virtualization, we will be using fewer physical units--fewer "resources."
In short, the math is not so simple.
Even if the resource cost to stand up and run a new server (with automation to patch and maintain the operating system) is zero, there's still a support cost in maintaining the application. Someone still has to patch (and test) the application to keep it up to date. Someone has to test the application after operating system patches to make sure nothing broke. Someone has to set up automated monitoring of an application that may not have been designed for any automated monitoring. Someone has to track down
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Someone still has to patch (and test) the application to keep it up to date.
A lot of the virtualization that my IT department is doing involves moving legacy boxes running ancient applications over to new servers. They are taking these 10 year old boxes running Windows 2000 and moving them into VMs as the hardware starts to die. In other words, the applications and OSes weren't being maintained before, and the VMs won't be maintained either. I'm not in IT, so don't flame me :)
Virtualization uses fewer physical resources? (Score:2)
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>Not much different than running all your apps on the one piece of hardware
Do you even sysadmin?
> Virtualization: A solution in search of a problem
I'll take that as a no.
You shouldn't be surprised by Jevons Paradox (Score:3)
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30 years ago, you had no LCD/plasma tv's.
So with a ratio of 3:1 tv's, you're saving power.
With a 4:1 you'd spend a little more power on prime-time, but if there was an "always on" tv on the house, you'd be still saving power.
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>Ever notice that games take as long or longer to load now than before, even though computer systems are orders of magnitude more powerful now?
Storage latency. Spinning hard disks are not orders of magnitude faster when loading gigabytes of random data then the 64k off of what ever medium 20+ years ago. Load that same huge game off a fast SSD or RAMdisk and it's pretty much instant.
A giant sucking sound of lost US admin jobs (Score:2)
Do US admins, technical staff, CS graduates, staff with double degrees really think US multinationals will let you work overtime with Seattle civilian aircraft engineers like wages for generati
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Give sensitive data to poor country's IT workers? they've already proven themselves not trustworthy, the horror stories from India alone boggle the mind. And good luck with any legal venue.
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They already have it (Score:2)
An accountant in my company is often bitching about the slow speed of internet banking, and the problem is there are a lot of bottlenecks between here and where the local bank holds their sensitive data on servers in India. It's the same with a lot of data entry of medical records.
I'm not suggesting it's a good idea but merely pointing out it's an idea that seagull management (makes noise, shits on everything then flies out) implemented in a lot of places at
Jevon's Paradox (Score:5, Insightful)
Jevon's paradox is valid, but only under specific economic assumptions.
It's only true so long as there is more demand for the resource, and it's only a problem when the resource has a cost attached. Essentially, it's true in a "scarcity" economy, but not true under "post scarcity".
We've achieved "post scarcity" for several resources already; for example, phone calls and computer time.
Phone calls used to be expensive and billed by the minute, but nowadays it's virtually free. Similarly, computer time used to be metered and charged - in college, the CPU time for each program run was deducted from your account. Nowadays people can have as much un-metered computer time as they want.
CPU time and phone service aren't literally free, but the cost is so small as to be negligible.
Despite this, we do not see infinite consumption. People have a certain level of need [wikipedia.org] for a resource, and when that need is met they stop consuming more. Coupled with a declining population, there is no reason to expect infinite consumption.
Your company may be using more resources than it needs... but so what? Computer resources are remarkably cheap - so cheap, in fact, that it may be more effective to ignore the problem. Optimize the biggest expenses first: if that turns out to be IT resources, then take a closer look. Otherwise, just ignore it.
(For another example of post-scarcity, consider the Chinese "dollar stores" that have cropped up. The cost of goods is so small that the time and expense of price tags makes a big difference. This is almost post-scarcity of tangible goods.)
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CPU time and phone service aren't literally free, but the cost is so small as to be negligible.
Despite this, we do not see infinite consumption.
Well yes. Infinite cnsumption would require zero cost. There is no such thing as negligible when it comes to infinite use.
The thing is we always want more. Bigger supercomputers, faster desktops, a phone as fast as a desktop and at the bottom end, more power than the teeny low power embedded 8051 running at 32.768kHz gives.
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CPU time and phone service aren't literally free, but the cost is so small as to be negligible.
Despite this, we do not see infinite consumption.
CPU time and electronic communication (and data storage) are excellent examples of Jevon's paradox. The cost has become negligible, and in response consumption has increased to the point where almost all use of these resources is either completely pointless, or of benefit to society so marginal that is is difficult to measure.
It's almost too easy to start citing examples:
- High frequency trading - astronomical use of low-latency coms and CPU power to perform arbitrages whose payoff rapidly converges to the
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The old parable. (Score:3)
Work expands to fill the space given to it.
Give it no definable boundaries?
SpaceMonster: OOOOOOOH!!! *Wiggles fingers acquisitively*
summary (Score:2)
IT is really important and users need IT services even though they don't think they do, says IT services company
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IT is really important and users need IT services even though they don't think they do, says IT services company which, by definition, understands IT services far better, from an operational as well as a strategic point of view, far, far better than most users.
TFTFY.
Use more resources (Score:2)
Using more resources is exactly what happens... As hardware gets faster, software gets slower. While some of the slowness can be attributed to additional features and larger data sets, much of it is down to using higher level languages. Very few people bother writing efficient code anymore, on the basis they can always throw more hardware at it.
I have personal experience with a few games that were deemed too slow and rather than try to improve the code, they were simply shelved for a couple of years until t
Force behavioral change (Score:2)
The problem I've seen in the 10 years I've been in this particular industry, is that very few large companies are doing char
Operative Word (Score:2)
"Might"
"Might" cost more than they save based on data gleaned from coal burning plants. I was going to call this an apples-to-oranges comparison, but those two things are actually fairly similar. This is more of an apples-to-hemidemisemiquaver comparison.
What? (Score:2)
Sticking stuff in teh cl0ud makes accounting clerks and order pickers transmogrify into software engineers?
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Of course helping the business get its task done is the only reason IT exists at all. If the increased usage
results in a more profitable operation, then its a good thing.
Ah, that's the problem though. Your typical corporate bean counter doesn't look at it that way. What they see is an increase in overhead, which drives profitability down. You have to have damn good data in order to prove that the increased cost actually lead to greater revenue and more profit than if they hadn't spent the money. That's the kind of thing that drives good IT managers fucking insane.
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> then cutting the price of the resource in half will be met by more than twice the original quantity demanded
In the history of computing so far, this has happened 'naturally'. Moores law up to this point has lead to a doubling of chip sizes (and therefore processing power) every 18 months. Your gas analogy is not compatible with the general trend of computing technology. Users would be surprised if there next car they bought didn't get double the gas mileage (halving the price of gas in usage) in digita
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>Back in 2000, the rule, and it worked, was one app per server.
Which was great at 2000 memory and processor levels where I might have a 32 bit operating system and a few gig of ram on a server. For the same price in U.S. dollars I can buy vastly larger hardware resources now.
>Now assholes are piling on the virtual servers
Or people who would rather buy fewer boxes and use the resources efficiently and be able to easily manage and migrate the virtual infrastructure. If you don't know how to use your res
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But everyone else is adopting agile, so if we choose to have longer architecture phase, we will fail to adapt to the evolving market, and lose out.
I suppose it's a tragedy of commons, with time-to-market as the abused resource.