Within the Cloud: Technical Concepts of Cloud Computing - Deploying and Managing a Cloud Infrastructure - page 56

FIGURE 3.1 TCO distribution per rack

System monitoring
1%

Project management
5%

Power equipment
18%

Space
15%

Racks
2%

Cooling equipment
6%

Service
15% Engineering and

installation
18%

Electricity
20%

But the harsh reality being faced by organizations that own and run their own data
centers is that things are further complicated by the need to maintain aging infrastructure
and applications. For some older data centers, it is estimated that as much as 80 percent of
the TOC is spent on maintenance. This is largely because of archaic applications and aging
infrastructure that need to be maintained because they are still important for the organiza-
tion's business processes.
It is not always an option to simply throw out your old data centers and move to the
cloud. You must consider the nature of the applications and workloads that are the core
functions of data centers:
■ Traditional data centers run a multitude of applications and have a wide variety of
workloads.
■ Many of the applications running in data centers are specially designed to cater to a
relatively few employees.
■ Most applications being run on older data centers have already been phased out of the
market but are still essential for the organization's core processes.
The nature of some of these applications means that it would not probably be cost effec-
tive to move to the cloud environment because replacing these core applications would
require significant changes and interruptions in the normal business operations.

Hardware and Infrastructure
Traditional data center hardware is not that different from cloud data center hardware
except for how they are configured in the underlying software and firmware. Non-cloud,