In an earlier blog I mentioned my requirements for a great
help desk for our organization. After a
lengthy search, trial, and selection process, a winner was picked. As it turned out, while the help desk used
standard software that we support, it used a database version that we did not
yet have running in our organization. We
were not able to upgrade our current databases, because other vendors’ systems
required older database versions.
We talked about options such as starting another database
server, and our help desk vendor mentioned that they had a lot of customers
starting to run their software in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Like many districts, while we have had many cloud
based software applications, we had never tried managed hosting, which has
gained a huge amount of traction in recent years, with a huge number of players
, now increasingly dominated by heavyweights such as Rackspace, Amazon,
Microsoft, Google, Verizon, and IBM.
Managed hosting is akin to renting a server, rather than
buying it. The customer gets to choose
the operating system and the software stack that goes on top. The customer typically will pay based on the
software chosen, the size of the hardware needed and more. Other charges may include additional charges
for bandwidth, storage, monitoring, support, and security services. Much like a rental of anything else, the
customer has control over how long they want it, from minutes to years. It is truly a pay as you consume
commodity. The servers are housed in the
managed hosting provider’s data center, so the customer never has to worry
about the plethora of mundane non-mission critical tasks that have been
traditionally associated with the acquisition, installation, maintenance, and decommissioning
of servers.
The traditional procurement and setup of servers in schools
districts and other institutions can traditionally takes weeks, if not
months. All of the following are tasks that
can be eliminated with managed hosting, so time to server spin up can be
slashed:
1.
Quoting of hardware.
2.
High up front capital costs.
3.
Data center space.
4.
Air-conditioning.
5.
Power.
6.
UPS and generators.
7.
Racks.
8.
Purchase orders.
9.
Receiving and inventory of equipment.
10.
Physical setup of equipment.
11.
Operating system and software installation.
12.
Switch ports.
13.
SAN space.
I am sure there are many things I left of the list, but the
point is we saved a large amount of upfront costs and saved time for our already
overburdened staff.
In our case our help desk vendor had an image for us to spin
up our server off of in the AWS cloud. We literally went from no server to
running application server in about ten minutes. It was incredible and makes me inclined to
think that we will be running many more servers this way in the coming
years. The huge capital costs and
efforts required to maintain data centers may not be sustainable when our money
could be better spent on projects that benefit student learning. While our need for servers is not likely to
lessen, the cheaper and faster bandwidth becomes, the motivation for districts
to move to managed hosting will increase.
This blog entry is cross posted with the great folks at SchoolCIO
