Deciding whether to own your servers is a big decision. And in many instances, the business need or project needs to be taken into account. For instance, an emergency project may be better suited to a cloud solution, whereas a major expansion could be a good case for dedicated hosting. Today we are going to focus on why its important to evaluate your current situation and take a closer look at owning your servers.
The Hypothetical Situation
You are the IT manager for a small-to-medium sized business and the marketing department sends over a notice that it is going to launch a new user tracking system on the company website. Included are the specs for the two-to-three servers needed to get the system setup. Oh, they need this ASAP!
You now have a few options –
- Buy a server from (Dell/Hp/IBM etc), and rack it in your office
- Buy a server from (Dell/Hp/IBM) and deploy it in a colocation environment
- Lease a server from the data center and deploy it in colocation
- Lease a hosted server from the data center
- Use the data center’s cloud
The Corresponding Tasks
Let’s look at deploying to cloud first. The easiest thing to do is to log into the admin, drag the slider bars to build the servers in the desired specs and click deploy. Up and running in about ten minutes and the project is handed back off to marketing. That “surprise project” is done and you can get back to your other day to day tasks.
Another option is to lease a hosted server from the data center, or, to use dedicated hosting. You would simply fill out the online order form and within 24 hours receive a login and password for the needed servers. Again, roughly five-to-ten minutes of actual work.
Now let’s examine purchasing servers. You would start by selecting a vendor, then paying upfront, and then waiting two-to-three weeks for it to be shipped. Not to mention it would then require racking to be completed, adding even more time to deployment. This could also create a situation where a single disruption could take out your IT assets. The bottom line here is you end up with a solution that takes much longer to implement, are paying the hardware cost upfront, and potentially putting your company at risk if there is a disaster of some sort.
So, while purchasing servers has been a model that has been used for years, it may not always make the most sense in today’s fast-paced business environment. Fortunately, there are a number of other options available.
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