In-house data centers: Living on borrowed time?
Source: LESLIE BROOKS SUZUKAMO, St Paul Pioneer Press, Sun, Dec. 18, 2005
The city of Minneapolis doesn't own a single computer. ...... The machines themselves didn't disappear, of course. Hundreds of PCs still sit on top of desks in City Hall. But in the Twin Cities and around the country, a few businesses are beginning to do away with the data centers they spent most of the past two decades building up. They are moving to another model of computing called "utility" or "on-demand" computing, in which they buy their computing as a service and let someone else worry about fiddling with the machines. Minneapolis outsourced its entire IT infrastructure to Unisys Corp. nearly three years ago, from the desktop machines to its underground data center that sprawled in the basement level between City Hall and the Hennepin County Government Center. Many of the Minneapolis IT workers moved to Unisys' payroll. Outsourcing isn't new, of course, but farming out the city's data center — the real muscle behind any business's IT work — is considered radical by most of the IT establishment.