[dundee] Microsoft tactics - Universities

[James Young]

This is getting to be a good post.  I'll give me 2 pence worth :-)

There's big Pros and Cons here; You're right -  the hardware is only a 
small percentage of the cost. And is in fact decreasing.  I mean, you 
can buy a 1TB disk for less than £250.00.  Can anyone remember how much 
a 1TB array sold by NCR cost in 1995 ? - £1,000,000.

Power consumption, (e.g. Air Con, physical security, upscaling).
Overhead costs (Carbon footprint - inc. Personnel)

In personal experience of Microsoft/EDS contracts it looks great - of 
course, the people making the decisions above us don't take the time to 
perceive the costs of the outsource.  The outsourcer without fail hits 
the customer with hidden costs (and I don't just mean financial 
folks)... and they own the data on the drives. 

It all depends on the goal.  For me its simple;

1) Be Proactive.
2) Plan ahead. (Note: not the same as 1.)
3) Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
4) Learn to be hardware and software agnostic.
5)Backup.

Data warehousing is what's coming after the current highly-available 
virtualisation as far as I can see.

You want a disk solution; buy a cheap array from one of the guys that 
the gene-splicers are getting an array from. 

Of course, the 'Buy in' from the brass is a problem. Can anyone think of 
ways to make them think that it was their idea?

Jason Cormie wrote:
> Andrew Clayton wrote:
>> On Sat, 15 Sep 2007 14:44:35 +0100, Jason Cormie wrote:
>>
>>> For the last year we have been on the brink of deploying "Windows
>>> Live @ EDU", whereby student email will be hosted by Microsoft,
>>> giving much bigger mail quotas than we could ever afford along with
>>
>> Interesting... as you can put together multi terabyte storage arrays
>> pretty cheaply these days.
>
> true, but you also need to employ someone to manage that email system, 
> backup that data, buy more expensive hardware for reliability( main 
> cheap disk arrays fall apart under heavy load), license the evil 
> proprietary software,  monitor it, be on call at weekends to deal with 
> outages, etc.
>
> The true cost is not just the hardware sitting in the datacenter, and 
> as the open source world knows free (as in beer) is a big incentive 
> for cash strapped organisations.
>
> -- 
> Jason Cormie
>
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