Datacenters: Colocation vs. Cloud
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So another thread about datacenters got me wondering, a number of years ago when we, as the SMB market primarily, talked about datacenters it was almost exclusively colocation that we talked about. I know that in my world that was certainly the case. Today, datacenter talk is almost exclusively cloud. We used to talk about specific datacenters and racking hardware. Now nearly everything is cloud instances and numerous colocation facilities have been reduced to the selection of EC2, Azure, Rackspace and similar datacenters for VMs.
For those of you looking at datacenter services, how much of new "purchases" do you look at in the form of colocation and how much in the form of cloud computing / IaaS?
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I know at NTG we have gone to almost 100% Cloud Computing / IaaS and what little colocation we have left is in the process of being phased out. Having dedicated hardware somewhere is a low level of work we are not looking to do, at least not for ourselves. It's not a place where we can add specific value. We make our "money, our value, but providing good services on top. We let someone else be our remote hands at the generic platform level where it is about nothing but basic uptime and reasonable cost - where there are no margins and little value add.
We hope to be 100% non-colocation by the end of the summer. Not that colocation is bad, there are tons of great cases where it makes loads of sense. But not for us. Our capacity just isn't that large. We get global redundancy and much higher end services going with cloud computing for our needs.
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Well.... I'm currently looking at deciding between colocation and IAAS for DR for a company.
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There are providers of hosted backup in the US who ship a hard drive for recovery if you need it, far as I know there is nothing like that in the UK.
So whilst cloud-backups with their zillion features are nice, restore times dictate whether you need a colo.
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client in question wants access to their data (we live on the gulf coast) in case of a hurricane. So now decide buy hardware to push backups to or rent space to do the same
Who offers ESXI as a service? -
@Breffni-Potter said:
There are providers of hosted backup in the US who ship a hard drive for recovery if you need it, far as I know there is nothing like that in the UK.
So whilst cloud-backups with their zillion features are nice, restore times dictate whether you need a colo.
You can get cloud backups with shipping physical disk features. Nothing about being virtual limits that.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
So whilst cloud-backups with their zillion features are nice, restore times dictate whether you need a colo.
Normally cloud is backed up to the same site for near instant restore and a DR site is another cloud. So the need for shipping drives does not exist in a standard architecture. Always unique cases, of course. But the "intention" of how cloud is used generally eliminates those needs.
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@Hubtech said:
client in question wants access to their data (we live on the gulf coast) in case of a hurricane. So now decide buy hardware to push backups to or rent space to do the same
Who offers ESXI as a service?CloudatCost does. One of the few that do this for public cloud (due to high cost, low performance.)
But for private cloud, Rackspace does this and few are better for private cloud.
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@Hubtech said:
Who offers ESXI as a service?
For private cloud, NTG would be happy to provide ESX as a service too!
@GregoryHall would be the point of contact for that initiative.
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@Hubtech said:
Who offers ESXI as a service?
Doesn't VMWare offer ESXi as a service?
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@coliver said:
@Hubtech said:
Who offers ESXI as a service?
Doesn't VMWare offer ESXi as a service?
Nope. They offer Diaster Recovery as a service. at almost $1,000/month minimum.
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@thecreativeone91 Oh... I thought it had more features then that.
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The thing is ESXi really only makes sense for SMB market due to it's ease of manageability. if you offer it as a service you have the IT knowledge to run it well, where as a SMB has little to no expertise. ESXi also does not scale very well. We have absolutely no ESXi here. Yet we are fully virtualized.
Having said that it should be easy to do DR to another Hypervisor if you plan well. or maybe just switch to Xen or XenServer.
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@coliver said:
@thecreativeone91 Oh... I thought it had more features then that.
If they did they would be competing a lot with their customers. I don't think that they want to go there as turning themselves into the sole VMware cloud host would make them a cloud backwater almost overnight.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
The thing is ESXi really only makes sense for SMB market due to it's ease of manageability.
ESXi as a service is really a SMB-focused product. Which big players like Amazon and Rackspace aren't willing to target.
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I guess I should say if you are offering the service you should have the knowledge. C@C didn't.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
You can get cloud backups with shipping physical disk features. Nothing about being virtual limits that.
Whether physical or virtual, I've not found a decent backup vendor in the UK who offers that feature. I need the data on a drive, with a courier, straight away. Unless I've missed someone really obvious.
@scottalanmiller said:
Normally cloud is backed up to the same site for near instant restore and a DR site is another cloud. So the need for shipping drives does not exist in a standard architecture.
Not sure I follow? With a single server and single site which needs a backup, server falls over, on site backups corrupted, time to use the cloud, what happens next?
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@scottalanmiller said:
Normally cloud is backed up to the same site for near instant restore and a DR site is another cloud. So the need for shipping drives does not exist in a standard architecture.
Not sure I follow? With a single server and single site which needs a backup, server falls over, on site backups corrupted, time to use the cloud, what happens next?
Well if the server is running in the cloud rather than locally. It has a local Instant recovery backup image at the same DC then the DC's DR site either has a hot version or a backup image at the DR site.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
Well if the server is running in the cloud rather than locally.
Key word being if of course.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Not sure I follow? With a single server and single site which needs a backup, server falls over, on site backups corrupted, time to use the cloud, what happens next?
With cloud, if things fail, you restore in seconds with another instance unless the ENTIRE site is down. Then you use your DR site. In either case, under normal cloud designs, downtime in minutes and shipping drives is not useful.
