Data Centers Account For 15 % Of I.T. Budgets, Google Says Their Future is Cloudy

In a new article on research from the the Uptime Institute, data center costs have risen from 1 to 3 % of I.T. budgets to between 5 and 15% and that is attracting industry attention. The article from PC World called Data Centers Devour 5 to 15 Percent of IT Budget says:

That's enough "to threaten the economic productivity of enterprise IT," says Ken Brill, executive director of the Uptime Institute.

Many standard total cost of ownership (TCO) calculations around data centers fall short on both capital and operating expenses, underestimating factors such as power and cooling, according to the research.

In conjunction with the new research, the institute is offering a downloadable TCO calculator for IT execs. The tool, designed to examine long-term costs and possible tradeoffs, and the supporting research were done by Jonathan Koomey, PhD, a senior fellow of the Uptime Institute, and a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Project Scientist and Stanford University consulting professor.

What can be done, Google thinks it knows, after all they have to something really big with all those new engineers they are hiring. The industry term for their solution is "Cloud Computing" and according to Nicholas Carr in his Rough Type post Google's cloud:

Google not only wants to hold all our data; it also wants to host all our applications. That, according to Robert Cringely, is the secret meaning behind the recent announcement that Google would be contributing code to MySQL, the popular open-source database. "While Google has long been able to mess with the MySQL code in ITS machines," writes Cringely, "it hasn't been able to mess with the code in YOUR machine and now it wants to do exactly that." Why? Because "Google wants us to embrace not just cloud computing but Google's version of cloud computing, the hooks for which will be in every modern operating system by mid-2009, spread not by Google but by a trusted open source vendor, MySQL."

Mid-2009 is when the new version of MySQL, with the Google hooks, will appear, says Cringely. It's also, he argues, when Google's global data center network will be complete.

THAT's when things will get really interesting. Imagine a much more user-friendly version of Amazon's EC2 and S3 services, only spread across 10 or more times as many machines. And as with all its services, Google will offer free versions at the bottom for consumers and paid, but still cost-effective versions nearer the top for businesses and education.

Google's goal here is to help us, of course, but along the way the company will have marginalized most higher-end computing vendors, especially Microsoft. They will have also made us totally dependent on Google services in such a way that we'll never, ever, be able to extricate ourselves. We'll be slaves, but happy slaves, and Google will come to dominate all computing for the next generation. Take the $100+ billion that U.S. industry currently spends each year on data center-based computing, cut that price in half and send it straight to the Googleplex.

Far-fetched? A bit. But sometimes you have to stretch to see the future. As Google made clear earlier this week, it's plotting an aggressive move into the delivery of applications, for businesses as well as consumers. Said CEO Eric Schmidt: “Most people who run small businesses would like to throw out their infrastructure and use ours for $50 per year." But it's not just small businesses that Google's targeting. The company also announced it's running Google Apps pilots in a couple of dozen Fortune 1000 companies, and in that context the primary role of Google Apps may be as a Trojan Horse that gets big companies used to the idea of running their apps on the world's most efficient supercomputer. Truth be told, most big companies wouldn't hesitate to throw out their IT infrastructure if a cheaper, more flexible and more secure alternative was available. Comments Schmidt, drily: "It looks like it can get pretty big."

So when can we switch off our Data Centers and move all their functionality to Google. It won't be overnight but Google is definably headed that direction. Google has gone a long way toward making interactive and modular web based applications. Their applications can be interlinked and enhanced. Google Widgets in conjunction with Google Gears may well be the future internal applications, with all (or most) data and processing handled by Google's Cloud. And as the story says the difference is that instead of paying for your own data center, you be cutting a check to Google.

Sphere: Related Content