A google alert today led me to Laurianne McLaughlin’s blog posting recalling a conversation in which Bill Coleman, BEA co-founder and now CEO of Cassatt, predicted CIOs will begin using utility computing and leaving data center operation to third parties like phone companies. Bill’s an exceptional sales person, but evidently he didn’t manage to convince Laurianne. She holds back her own opinion, but quotes a colleague:

“CIOs will not be comfortable shipping out this much data center responsibility.”

Ironically, in their March 1st issue, CIO magazine explains just one reason why Bill is correct.
In an article titled, Zapped, Kenneth Brill reports that
The Uptime Institute calculates the current cost to purchase a rack of servers, $138,000, pales in comparison to the $206,000 cost of electricity and HVAC to operate those servers over three years. Worse, while hardware costs are steadily falling, energy costs are rising and that’s compounded by the ever increasing power density of modern servers. The Institute projects energy costs to increase as much as 10X over the next five years for that same rack of servers.

I’ve come to the conclusion that in the approaching era when data center upgrades are measured in mega-watts and nearly half the footprint of a data center is consumed with power distribution and HVAC, CIOs are going to have an increasingly difficult time justifying owning their own data center.