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I think you just need to think through what you need. If the issue is administration, backup, failover and security, basically outsourcing the box and administration, then there are probably several folks out there that are a "service bureau" style operation that will handle that for you. The "rent" vs buy isn't an easy decision. Cost/benefit analysis can be difficult.

I see the "cloud" as completely virtual and very different than the "service bureau" The i seems well suited for this but I think the need for it is rather specialized. Since your box would be virtual you can add processing capacity, memory and storage on the fly. Spin up an instance and then "park" it for a while then reactivate it. This kind of thing makes sense in environments that demand maximum flexibility. The interesting thing is that you get *some* of this flexibility on i out of the box so the question would be why go to the cloud for it? If a "slice" of an i is all you need, I can see a great need for that and I think that is where the iDevCloud folks come in. At the other end, the highly flexible, variable demand business, I can see the economics and flexibility of the cloud would be a plus, though my guess is that you would pay for it. But, in the middle, with predicable workloads and growth, I don't see the need for the slice or the whole enchilada. The service bureau model *might* fit in that space but it would be contingent on your in house expertise and the need for backup, fail over and other DR factors I think.

I run about 5-7 servers and the i here at my home. When you add up the costs of the leasing, the hardware, time invested in updating and troubleshoot AND the electricity bill (which my wife always reminds me of!) I could probably do things much cheaper using a service bureau/ASP style hosting. But then I wouldn't know the details of the operations and would be less knowledgeable about them and couldn't be as helpful to my customers. I learn a lot from running my own shop, and I believe that the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs (financial, time invested and personal hassle).

All things to consider.

Pete Helgren
Value Added Software, Inc
www.asaap.com
www.opensource4i.com


On 4/20/2011 2:56 PM, Jeff Crosby wrote:
Brainstorming in management meeting today.

Instead of getting new Power 7 HW to replace our Power 5 HW, is the
state-of-the-universe such that we could entertain putting our i in the
cloud?

What I mean is, no i, no physical windows servers here, it's all out there
somewhere. The only HW here is printers, displays, thin clients, and PC
workstations.

But I still develop in house for it, still configure it, etc.



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