Modernizing the SAAS data center – part 1….

If the 80’s was the birth place of the desktop computer, the early 90’s the start of the operating system wars, the late 90’s was without a doubt the staging ground for hosted services. With that being said, the data center took form giving a home to thousands if not millions of small servers offering hosted services of every type imaginable. From website / email hosting to complex sales customer management systems, the data center has grown organically into the life blood of companies endeavoring to make their place in the SAAS world.

Until recently, scalability and recovery  meant large scale investment in passive “standby” equipment, tape archives, even contracts for site recover centers that could be called upon in the worst of disasters. As data center grew so have the operating costs to keep them running. Space, power, management overhead, connectivity bandwidth have driven profits down making older models of scaling no longer feasible to sustain or grow the business. It has become increasingly necessary to look for means to leverage hardware efficiencies, centralize and minimize data storage, and leverage technologies to self heal the data center in the event of a disaster. One such avenue has been to leverage virtualization and the ancillary industries that promote the aforementioned goals.

In the next few posts, I will begin my investigation of such technologies and discuss my opinions and observations along the way. I invite ideas, comments, and suggestions as I hope this series of post to be a learning experience for myself and those of you who wish to join me. Stay tuned…..