Corporate server hosting

Companies need to treat their corporate servers like highly trained athletes.  They need to keep them in top condition - fed with the right stuff and given the appropriate exercise environment.  You also value them appropriately - you do not put your top NBA player up in a run down motel and feed them junk food...

 

What do I mean by this?  Well, when small and mid-sized companies keep their servers in-house it is usually because they do not know any better.  They put them in a place where the "techie" person can get at them, but also where they are relatively safe (this means radically different things to many companies).  This may be in the room where the phone lines come into the building, or where the main electrical switches are.

 

Note that I did not say a place where the servers are "secure".  The room that they are in is usually unlocked with easy access possible by pretty much anyone who wanders off to go to the bathroom - employees, outsourced janitorial staff, customers, and vendors.

 

Note that I did not say cool or dust free either.  I have seen multi-million dollar businesses - such as car dealerships, wholesale pipe distributors with their vital servers in back rooms where most surfaces were under half an inch of dust and suffering from high heat and humidity ..and wondering why they were experiencing "issues" on a regular basis.

 

It makes sense for companies to take advantage of Utility Computing providers.  The benefits are many:

-Central datacenter location - equally accessible from any office, mobile or home location

-priced on a utility basis (often per GB allocated memory and per GB allocated storage)

-additional server software can often be added on a subscription basis

-backups done for you

-highly virtualized server environment provides higher uptime than dedicated physical servers

-top end and standardized server and storage hardware is utilized from a central pool, reliant on no single box

-highly redundant environment

-specialized experts, specialized tools and automation available at an affordable price

-high bandwidth environment

-high security environment

 

To try and do all of this internally is no longer financially sensible, unless you are a very large company or have extremely paranoid security requirements.  To finish the analogy - why try to develop your own team of top athletes, coaches and a whole stadium from scratch, when you can acquire the services of exactly what you need, when you need it?