Cloud-Services vs Virtualization

As many of you already know, we have been  strong proponent of cloud-based services for a very long time…   The idea of  maintaining an expensive and complex in-house infrastructure to support basic IT services  is steadily shifting away from mainstream business. Adoption of cloud-based services continues to climb steadily.

However, a recent  article on the Dec’09/Jan’10 Fortune Small Business magazine titled “Control the Cloud“, provided an excellent example that “one-platform” does not fit all.

The FBS article describes a company, which provides a specific set of application services for its customers, whose requirements were not met by cloud-computing.     They reconsidered their implementation, brought it back in-house,  this time they used server virtualization to minimize  the number of physical servers which resulted in significant cost reduction including space, power and air.

Although, in the end, not a less expensive solution than cloud-based computing,  it did meet the requirements and goals, at significant costs reductions than their previous hardware based implementations.

Let us know what you think! – If you have a story to share, send it our way!