The most recent Business Meets IT seminar earlier this month focused on datacenters, so naturally it caught our attention. Keynote speaker of the day was Luc Verbist, CIO of media concern De Persgroep. After a presentation of their own datacenters (2 fully redundant DC's with 4 cubes in total), he also shared his thoughts on internal versus external datacenters. Some of the arguments sound very familiar: if you need a 24x 7 operations, you will more likely outsource your datacenter. If you don't have enough critical mass, you will too. But the decision will also depend on other variables such as: the availability of skilled resources, building restrictions and regulations, and whether your company has an opex or capex strategy. There are many variables but more often than you's expect, you will be driven to the decision pro outsourcing.
Other thoughts worth mentioning: "Experienced project and maintenance teams as valuable as the product itself" (Serge Bogaerts from Cenaero) and "In the year 2000 only Walmart had 200 terabyte worth of data, nowadays any average company with over 1.000 employees already has more than 200 terabyte of data." (William Visterin, Smart business) And this evolution will only accelerate, so data centers and their suppliers can rest assured: there are challenging times ahead. Not challenging as in 'will we have enough business?' but as in: 'how will we manage to keep on growing faster and faster?' A challenge that we gladly accept and that we're already tackling today.
