Data center economics

Typically you hear about the cost of data centers, their energy consumption and such. It’s was good to read a more down to earth view from Computerworld in their Building-block data centers may reshape IT post. With these massive utility computing factories coming online, they quote Gartner analyst David Smith who estimates that it costs about $10 per month to provide e-mail services to an employee via internal systems. Doing so through an online cloud may cost only $5 per month.

"The economics are very compelling," Smith said.

No kidding. If you’re Boeing or Coca Cola and you multiply that by 100k users or so, that’s quite a saving.

ps – check out Dave’s post on the origin of the photos above :)