[lug] distribution favorites?

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Sun, Nov 12, 2006 at 10:02:47AM -0700, Nate Duehr wrote:
>not always -- an organization would be better off not having an IT 
>department at all, especially if they trust their vendor(s).  Right now, 

Having an IT department probably is a good thing.  The bigger problem is
the places that should have IT resources, but instead have people wear two
hats.  We often get called in to shops that have a developer similar person
doing system administration in their spare time.  Of course, these people
don't often have any spare time to begin with, so something ends up being
neglected.

We've been quite successful at providing IT resources to these companies,
and also companies with one or two existing system/network admins.  Because
of the size of our staff, we can cover weekends, holidays, and vacations,
where a single in-house admin often can't.  And since the majority of our
clients are outside of Colorado, we also provide some business continuity,
because some of the company's IT staff is now located in a different part
of the country.

Back to the topic of leasing computing resources, we've also had quite a
bit of success with doing this via our managed hosting offerings.
Combining the system, network, power, cooling, and management into
something our clients don't have to worry about, is a huge advantage to
them.  They can concentrate on what makes them unique to their customers,
which usually isn't hosting a server...

We have one client who recently brought up the idea of migrating to a grid
system like Sun's offering.  It doesn't sound like that's anywhere near
ready for moving a hosted application to, but in some ways I think we're
moving back to "computers as a utility", where you just buy the cycles and
bandwidth you need and the rest is taken care of for you behind the scenes.

Mainframes were fairly good at this model, though very expensive.

Sean
-- 
 Early morning cheerfulness can be extremely obnoxious.
                 -- William Feather
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability