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Showing posts from November 12, 2010

Cloud economics: Not really black and white..

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While some of the interest in moving towards public cloud is based on sound economics, there is a small segment of this movement purely due to the “ herd mentality ”. The slide on the right is from a Microsoft publication shows that larger networks may be less economical on the cloud (at least today). Richard Farley, has been discussing this very topic for few months now. He observed that a medium sized organization which already has a decent IT infrastructure including a dedicated IT staff to support it has a significantly smaller overhead than what cloud vendors might make it look like. Here is a small snippet from his blog. If you are not afraid to get dirty with numbers read the rest here . Now, we know we need 300 virtual servers, each of which consumes 12.5% of a physical host.  This means we need a total of 37.5 physical hosts.  Our vendor tells us these servers can be had for $7k each including tax and delivery with the cabinet.  We can’t buy a half server, a