Cloud Computing For Dummies®

Chapter 5. Seeing the Advantages of the Highly Scaled Data Center

In This Chapter

• Modeling a data center

• Location, location, location

• Powering things up

• Cooling things off

As we discuss in Chapter 1, many company managers are demanding that IT management transform their data centers into platforms that can scale easily and effectively. Other managers are looking at the cloud platform as a way to eliminate the high costs of running traditional data centers.

If you're tasked with planning your cloud strategy, how do you do what's best for your organization? At first glance, it might seem obvious: Simply find a cloud services provider, analyze how much it charges for the services you need, and compare it to the costs of your own data center. It isn't that simple.

• It's unlikely that everything you do in your data center will be available as a cloud service.

• Even if it is, it might not meet your specific needs.

Ultimately, cloud services are attractive because the cost is likely to be far lower than providing the same service from your traditional data center, so we think it will help if you understand why cloud data center costs are lower. This economic factor applies to clouds whether they're private or public.

In fact, the cloud data center has two aspects:

• The costs of things that don't depend directly on technology

• The costs of things that do

In this chapter, we take an in-depth look at the things that don't depend on technology and explain why the cloud data center has a significant cost advantage. ...