No more servers? Rackspace says IT workers are tired of them
Summary: Rackspace hosting has launched a No More Servers campaign, highlighting the attitudes of IT workers who are tired of spending their time maintaining troubled servers.
Who among IT workers has never been involved in a mad scramble - a crisis situation, if you will - because of server failure? Maybe it caused your site's home page to go down or the e-mail system to become disabled or maybe the e-commerce system to crash. Whatever the problem, when a server crashes, it's never any fun.
In today's world of virtual everything, the idea of outsourcing server space is something that IT departments are seriously weighing. Today, Rackspace - which, of course, is in the business of providing the server space for businesses - launched a No More Servers campaign and released the results of a survey that found that half of all businesses surveyed would "love to never have to buy another server again."
It's been a week chock full of IT surveys. Yesterday, I posted some details on a survey that found that 40 percent of IT professionals (and an even higher number of executives) are still confused by cloud computing - and that could be delaying adoption in the enterprise. Jason Hiner has a posted some results as it relates to CIOs - a post yesterday that revealed that IT budget slashing, which was rampant last year, won't be as bad this year. In a post today, Hiner revealed that 76 percent of CIOs time is spent on non-technical issues
We've written time and time again about how IT workers spend so much time reacting to issues and working to just keep the engine humming that there's no time left for work that benefits the growth of the business. So what do they spend their time doing? The results of the survey paint that picture:
- IT teams said they spend about 60 percent of their time troubleshooting and managing servers.
- IT managers suffer from "server stress," who cite the need to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week as one of the leading causes.
- More than half (51 percent) admit to making mistakes in the server capacity planning - with 15 percent buying too many servers and 36 percent underestimating their needs.
When it comes to their thoughts on new technologies, 35 percent considered themselves to be "proactive and slightly ahead of the curve" while 28 percent tend to be "cautious and reactive."
Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily email newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.
Talkback
And, as servers move to the cloud, fewer and fewer will be Windows servers.
licensing for Windows, and, then Windows is less
stable and less secure.
And when you use the cloud
Perhaps you should speak with an IT professional about that.
Well, if you are running your e-commerce application on-site, and your
millions. Who would be stupid enough to do that?
RE: No more servers? Rackspace says IT workers are tired of them
You are kidding, right?
My servers run like well oiled machines. They do their jobs and have little or no downtime. They are the best part of my job. And it is the servers that allow me to increase the efficiency of my company's operations. It is my servers that allow me to develop new ways for my IT to benefit my company.
Tell me another way an IT professional is going to help his company other than keeping the data centers running at their optimum.
This has to be one of the cheesiest article I have read on this sight. Written by someone that hasn't got a clue how IT relates to business.
re: You are kidding, right?
I'm not an IT guy so I can't say with certainty about what happens behind the scenes from one day to the next. But I have been an end-user (employee) who has been affected by server problems and know that, when problems hit, IT folks have to stop what they're doing and scramble to put out a fire.
[i]Tell me another way an IT professional is going to help his company other than keeping the data centers running at their optimum.[/i]
It's interesting that you would say that because the feedback I get from folks working in IT is that they feel they would be more helpful to the company if they could spend less time dealing with problems and more time innovating to help the company operate more efficiently.
Sorry you thought my post was cheesy...
Maybe the survey was cheesy.
Of course if the survey had asked the people who really know, those who work with servers, they'd have got a very different outcome.
Isn't that their job?
Same here
You are missing what they are selling.
There is a move (as shown in some IT/management talks) to get rid of the (local) systems administrator/network engineer and outsource your infrastructure to a manages service provider (as in, Rackspace, Microsoft, etc.) and this will simplify the IT budget and reduce costs due to systems administrators having to manage hardware issues (not always true, but it is a perception).
Yes, the article is fairly bad... but that is the basic idea behind what is being offered (and what CIOs hear).
Wow, what news.
I guess in Rackspace's perfect world those of us IT workers who deal with servers would all be working for them since they'll need the support once they have everyone's outsourced servers.
The servers are just moving
is tending to it. They're just moving to RackSpace's
servers.
Basically, you're paying RackSpace's IT staff to do what
your IT staff does.
RE: The servers are just moving
But, you forgot to include:
1) Rackspace's overhead, and
2) Rackspace's [b]profit margin,[/b] and
3) No longer being able to [b]walk over and choke the neck of your IT department[/b] in the event they fsck up. You and Rackspace will now play the [u]blame game[/u] in the event you encounter problems. Also, keep in mind, to these firms, you are only [b]one[/b] customer; they have others.
I don't know...
I spent a lot of time getting the hardware right, making sure I had the capacity, and putting in redundancy and fail over. In five years I've lost a few hard drives and one mainboard, but hardware has never caused any critical outages.
I don't think you're going to save all this money going to the cloud. 90 servers at around $500/ mo (that's rackspace pricing, mind you) and you're talking $45k per year. The cost of additional local bandwidth, network gear, support... where's the real savings?
This whole cloud scheme reminds me of outsourcing - how the whole world was going to do it, and it would be so much cheaper, and the quality would be the same... how's that working out?
Trend shows need for many to transition from "I.T. worker" to "Engineer"
it is I.T. worker. Granted all these terms are still used but the job gets less respect than it used to and less salary.
As trends such as the migration away from on-site to hosted management continue, the demand for "IT workers" will decrease as well.
This shows that many of these "IT workers" need to think about transitioning to a skill-set more in line with the changing industry.
Management of Information Systems is need of a new paradigm.
Especially, now with cloud computing, advancing technology is changing the way businesses collaborate, communicate, transact - everything is changing, and changing fast.
Designing and Engineering skills as well as business aptitude are needed to bring all the latest and up-coming advances together into integrated simplified methods for using technology efficiently in a specific business or industry.
As is now, and it seems will continue, more and more "IT workers" will lose jobs or be devalued and "Engineers" and MBA graduates with a technology focus will be in demand.
The ongoing trends in the I.T. industry point to the need for many who do "I.T. work" to transition to skills and experience that lend more toward engineering and business.