Faster 'Net growth rate raises fears about routers

Tue Apr 3 19:36:27 UTC 2001

> From: Eric A. Hall [mailto:ehall at ehsco.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2001 12:10 PM

> Convincing customers that it is cheaper/better to put their 
> main servers
> somewhere off-site away from them is the challenge. Otherwise 
> more of them
> would do it.

You understate the problem. Service bureaus and ASPs have one problem in
common, MIS/IT departments are loath to place their corporate data (jewels)
under the control of another. Convincing them otherwise is an up-hill battle
that you will mostly lose.

To a lesser extent, this is also true of colos. The other part of the
argument, that the local (fully burdened) square-footage is almost always
cheaper than decent colo space ($1,200.00 per 1/4 rack, per month, typical).

You therefore have two strong motives for locating corp datacenters on-site,
rather than off-site. Either one, by themselves, are difficult to overcome.

Then you have the third argument; most corporate data centers are used more
internally than externally (road-warriors and B2B ops not withstanding). For
performance reasons, you want the servers closest to their users. Unless you
can get 100baseTX to the off-site facility, this means a strong incentive to
mount servers at HQ, not in the colo.

We are now back to multi-homing a business. BTW, this entire mess was played
out before, in the 70's and 80's ... when the service bureau biz died. At
that time SNA APPN/APPC was the network (my briefs were dyed "blue" at the
time). The end-game was proprietary pre-internet data centers, connected by
mutiple slow links.