Friday, August 22, 2008

Amazon Sends Death Blow to I.T. Data Center

The time of death for the corporate data center was pronounced at 11:03EST, August 21st of 2008. Forensic pathologists continue to investigate the death, however, it is known that the patient had stability issues, persistent hemorrhaging and had been considered terminal.


Thousands of companies have mortally wounded data centers. Unfortunately, CIO's lacked a viable replacement for this archaic agility anchor. In essence, they've been forced to keep them on life-support. Billions of dollars have been pumped into various unsuccessful attempts to heal the patient. Billions more have been spent on 'Data Center Hospice'. Jeff Schneider, MomentumSI CEO commented, "When it becomes it was clear that the patient will die, corporations shift their thinking to 'reducing the pain'. This largely involves moving labor intensive data center tasks to low-cost offshore facilities."

Although some debate remains if the data center is actually dead. Schneider stated , "Yes, the data center has a heart beat, however the beat coincides with the I.T. family beating on the heart with their fists, insisting that the patient isn't dead."

Congratulations to Amazon on delivering the last critical element of their Elastic Cloud Computing offering.

3 comments:

ericgallant said...

Really? No more security or reliability issues to work out? I can turn everything that is absolutely vital to my business and extremely sensitive to my customers over to the cloud? I (and only I) will always have access to the data without interruption? That's terrific.
Maybe next you can blog about how public transportation has killed the personally owned vehicle.

Anonymous said...

I share concerns of Eric Gallant. Who ever said that IT is the anchor for corporate data? It always was the ownership of sensitive corporate information.

I know a pension management company which once outsourced maintenance of old databases, with all data in them,...to a contractor company in India. I do not understand why anybody would attack us after that? Later on, everything was returned back but the fact of such outsourcing is quite similar to sending data-centres into the cloud.

Is the cloud everywhere now?..

- Michael Poulin

jeff said...

Hey Eric,
You're right of course - the data center didn't die. However, I do believe that it is terminally ill and that there is now a viable alternative.

I'm not sure if this is you:
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/5/519/651

If so, I can understand your natural inclination to not want the data center to be dead, since your paycheck depends on it. All I can say is that I believe that we've entered a new era of computing and that those individuals injured by disruptive innovation have the opportunity to leverage the very disruption to their personal benefit.
Jeff