Sunday, February 10, 2013
Like a physical factory, some of an information factory’s work is done on the premises and some off-site at other locations, including those of subcontractors or suppliers. In the case of information factories, the product being produced is information services, with the machinery being servers, storage, and I/O networking managed with software, processes, procedures, and metrics. Raw materials include data, energy to power and cool the physical facility, and technologies, all operating to deliver the services at a low defect or error rate while meeting or exceeding QoS, performance, availability, and accessibility requirements in a cost-effective manner.
For some cloud compute or storage providers, the value proposition is that they can supply the service at a lower cost than if you use your own capabilities. Similar to service bureaus, out-sourcing, managed service, or hosting facilities of the past, cloudbased services are a means of shifting or avoiding costs by moving work or data elsewhere to be processed or stored.
However, it is a mistake to consider clouds for just for their cost- saving abilities while ignoring performance, availability, data integrity, ease of management, and other factors that can impact service delivery and expenses. Clouds should be looked at not as a replacement or competing technology or technique, but rather as a complementary approach to existing in-house resources.
Cloud computing and storage are simply additional tiers of servers and data repositories that may have different performance, availability, capacity, or economics associated with them to meet specific business and/or application needs. That is, cloud computing and cloud storage coexist and complement what is currently being done, with the objective of boosting quality of service, availability, or customer satisfaction while supporting more data being processed, moved, and stored for longer periods of time at a lower unit cost.
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