In the eyes of a fifth-grader, here is what we do:

Indeed, we are designed to always stay running. In less than 6 hours we will begin moving a live production environment of nearly 120 servers from their current home approximately 60 miles away into new racks in our facility. Those servers are coming here in part because keeping up with the always-on demands of today’s infrastructures is increasing more difficult and expensive to do.  It has come to the point where if IT infrastructure is not your core business, it’s awfully difficult to justify the ever rising costs of running an always-on environment yourself.

We’ve spent months getting ready for this move, and now in these hours before “go time”, it is eerily quiet in that part of the data center. Other than the hum of CRAC units and core switch fans, not a creature is stirring.  The patch cables are sorted in boxes with care, in hopes that people with servers soon will be there (sorry, couldn’t resist).  But once completed, the large precisely choreographed effort required to move our new customer into a better home will result in always-on uptime at  a fraction of what it would cost to build from scratch or remodel.

Since all of the data center details for this move are already cared for, it’s now time to make sure the most important item is covered:  three shifts-worth of fine coffee.

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Take a look at this awesome photo essay.  Thankfully, this gear is long gone from our data centers.

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When AT&T inked its exclusive iPhone deal with Apple, they surely must have had the smile of the fabled Cheshire cat.    AT&T had sole possession of a hot product with a locked-in revenue stream – what could be better?   Have a look at the following analysis by Alcatel-Lucent on North American iPhone wireless usage:

The iPhone is turning out to be a bit more expensive for AT&T than perhaps they were expecting.   While the air time minutes aren’t all that interesting, the bandwidth numbers do tell a  story – unexpected hidden costs.  The bandwidth-hungry nature of iPhone web applications is seriously taxing the AT&T wireless network, and the company will have to add cell towers and back-haul lines to support the increasing load.   Who’s going to foot that bill?  Since iPhone plans don’t have bandwidth limits, it won’t be existing customers, and so it turns out that the locked-in revenue stream is really a double-edged sword.   AT&T can’t go back to existing customers for more money, but they need to fund the expansion to keep the service viable.   Sounds a little like blackmail – infrastructure blackmail to be exact.

The underlying message of the iPhone story has a familiar ring to it (no pun intended).  Do you have technology in your business that periodically puts you over a financial barrel?   Are you finding yourself forced to fund infrastructure improvements without additional revenue to offset the cost?

We all have critical business applications – those applications without which we cannot transact business.   Sooner or later the day comes when the system breaks and can’t be fixed without being upgraded.  Then we learn that the upgrade comes with a list of pre-requisite hardware and other ancillary software that has to be upgraded as well.   The total price tag is huge, but there is no choice.   We swallow hard and pay the cost, or else the vendor banishes us to the land of No Technical Support with a broken application.

Insofar as unexpected server hardware costs are concerned, virtualization can be a saving grace.   If you have a virtualized system with excess capacity, you can react quickly at no additional cost.    Our analysis of customer systems over the past decade reveals that on average, most servers are running at under 15% processor utilization.   If you still haven’t virtualized a portion of your environment, this is an easy strategy to deploy to avoid infrastructure blackmail.

Another strategy is to find a good hosting partner that can provide you with capacity on demand, either with physical or virtualized servers.    By moving to a hosted environment, you effectively transfer the burden of hidden infrastructure expense from yourself to the hosting company.   Large unexpected capital expenses can be transformed into low to moderate increases in operating expense.   AT&T is probably wishing they could do that very thing right about now…

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