Microsoft: Australian datacentre not financially viable
Posted Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at 5:44 pm by Jason Cartwright
It’s official, Microsoft will not be building an Australian data centre. During a Cloud round table, Microsoft explained that it is not financially viable to build and run datacentres in Australia. A very long internal spread sheet is used to calculate the economics of where and when to build datacentres across the globe.
Temperature, Power Costs, Latency, Stable governments, Geography, Natural disasters are all taken into consideration when selecting the perfect site. Australia is also burdened with the 20 Million problem. Large datacentres only really make sense when used on a large scale. Unfortunately Australia’s volume of use wouldn’t match up to the cost model Microsoft want to charge for cloud services.
Despite being available in 41 countries, Azure deployments can only be published to the US, Europe or Asia. The closest being Southeast Asia, which Microsoft assures use that latency back and forward to, isn’t a problem.
Things are constantly evolving in this space. Take the new datacentre in Dublin, which can now run servers around room temperature meaning the water and cooling requirements are significantly reduced.
Some Enterprise customer needs are serviced in Australia by Microsoft partnering with providers of smaller datacentres like Fujitsu or Telstra for services like Office 365.
Interestingly Amazon have announced they are going to build an Australian datacentre. Clearly their infrastructure scale and cost models are different than that of Microsoft’s, in reality, the end consumer sees Amazon able to make it work, when Microsoft can not.
There is NO law that prevents offshore data storage in the cloud
Posted Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at 5:17 pm by Jason Cartwright
Image by karindalziel
There is a trend developing amongst Australian companies. Those who went down the outsourcing route, are now reining back services and looking to cloud solutions to solve common business functions. With this trend, a number of questions arise around the storage of sensitive data outside Australian borders.
Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft Australia, Greg Stone, says there is actually no legislation in place that requires businesses to store private information in Australia. This is a common misconception which is often quickly dissolved when legal advice is sought, rather than just assuming or following hearsay. One exception suggested was highly sensitive government information that may need to be stored locally for national security reasons.
Often concerns about the ability for foreign governments to force the turnover of data adds to the concern of data centres being located off-shore. In reality, the ability for international governments to request data is enabled through existing channels, wether the documents be stored in a filing cabinet, or on a server.
The cloud services are setup, but who’s paying the bills?
Posted Friday, March 4, 2011 at 7:00 am by Craig Lees
Unless you’ve been stuck under a rock for the last 127 days, you will have probably heard of “the cloud”. The cloud is the raging trend being discussed in enterprise meeting rooms everywhere, as a way of saving money and trimming the bottom line. It’s been touted as the hassle free way of exponentially expanding your environment in peak demand and just as easily shrinking it again, it allows you to minimize the internal server and network device maintenance requirements and potentially cut back your downtime and outages dramatically. So why aren’t companies moving in their thousands to a cloud based service? Well they are.
Small moves like implementing Exchange Hosted services to work as spam protection for internal email services, or moving the company’s intranet and internet services to a cloud based service is the proverbial toe dipping being exercised by some IT departments. Slowly, as the figures from these small moves are digested, it’s becoming more evident to the money men within some enterprises that moving previously internal systems to a Cloud service provider can be a very prudent business decision. After all, if you can present a lower expenditure to your management whilst maintaining, if not increasing, current service levels. Then you are going to be at the top of the list when projects or promotions come up.
Image credit: Dynamic Business
So what are the down sides? Apart from the obvious and most talked about concerns of moving your secure data offsite, there is the frightening prospect of being dead in the water should your Cloud service fail. Obviously redundancies and contingencies will be heavily discussed during talks with potential service providers. Once these details are highlighted and accounted for there doesn’t seem to be many more pressing concerns that you wouldn’t normally have with any vendor regarding hardware capability and capacity. Or is there?
Through day to day discussions with peers in the IT industry it has become plainly obvious to me that there is one crucial element the majority of companies are overlooking. That is the potentially expensive practice of large increases in data that will now be traversing your external links. Unbelievably, I have been made aware of a number of projects in recent months that have completely overlooked the area of network data increases. Now for some companies an increase in traffic is not a concern. Many ISP’s have commercial plans that will allow for large data increases at no extra cost. However not all businesses will be setup like this, and it these companies which may be in for a large surprise when the next monthly account arrives detailing a charge which will more than likely wipe out any projected savings earned by moving “to the cloud” .
Tech.Ed 2010 – Microsoft’s Cloud
Posted Sunday, August 29, 2010 at 4:18 pm by Jason CartwrightOne of Microsoft’s key strategies for the future is cloud computing not only for some personal use – skydrive, office web apps and My Phone, but also business. Their cloud platform Azure hosts services like Exchange, SharePoint, SQL to name a few. There are few companies that do things at the scale that Microsoft does, which means Azure customers have access to ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Microsoft servers.
In a pay-as-you-go model, Cloud services are particularly cost effective for start-ups that want avoid massive up front investment for server infrastructure. Also those businesses that often experience peak demands at certain times of the year. Valentine’s day for a florist is the example used during my interview with Gianpaolo Carraro & Phil Goldie from Microsoft.
Cloud services are pivotal to another key strategy from Microsoft – three screens and a cloud. This means that content delivered to your phone, desktop / laptop and you tv are all stored up in the cloud. This provides new possibilities like taking your game status from the Xbox and picking it up on your WP7 device. An interesting concept indeed, it’ll be a case of wait and see just how well Microsoft manage to execute on this vision.
Watch the interview below.
More info @ http://microsoft.com/windowsazure
Windows Azure announced for Australia
Posted Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 9:33 am by Jason Cartwright
Update
The Windows Azure platform will be available in Australia in April 2010.
Update 2
Microsoft are not announcing Australian pricing today. Which begs the question, what’s the point ? The price is the single critical piece of information that will affect businesses decision to move to Azure or not.
Microsoft has officially launched their Azure platform in Australia. Azure offers Microsoft services in the cloud like Exchange, SQL, SharePoint as well as storage and application hosting to enterprises and startups.
Microsoft say the benefits to businesses that choose to use Windows Azure are:
- Bring your ideas to market faster and pay as you go
- Reduce costs of building and extending on-premises resources
- Reduce the effort and costs of IT management
- Respond quickly to changes in your business and customer needs
- Choose an on-premises or off-premises deployment model that best suits your needs.
- Scale your IT resources up and down based on your needs.
- Consume computing resources ONLY when the needs arise.
- Focus less energy on managing operational resources and constraints.
- Remove the need to manage hardware
- Use your existing development skills to build cloud applications
- Consistent development and management experience across on-premises and the cloud.
Windows Azure has been available in the US for months now, the important thing about today’s announcement is local, Australian servers. This becomes critical when it comes to speed, with businesses moving multiple gigabytes of data up and down from cloud services.
Watch the conversation on Twitter – #azureau
