A clean well lighted place was all a waiter wanted in Hemmingway’s famous short story.
It’s all a computer wants too.
At a media tour of PacNet’s Sydney city data centre earlier today Atul Thapar, Managing Director of integrator E-Bit Systems, gave a brief talk on the pros and cons of cloud computing.
Much of Atul’s presentation covered the same territory as the Business in the Cloud presentation in making the argument for why businesses should use cloud computing services.
A stand out point in Atul’s presentation was that computers like clean, well lit places.
“Dust-prone unstable environments will age hardware,” said Atul. “And the result is system failures and downtime.”
This is a good point – most businesses treat their servers terribly and at best they are kept in a stuffy, dusty closet where they get clogged up and neglected.
While running PC Rescue I encountered one cat loving real estate agent who kept her office server in an operational kitty litter tray. Needless to say she wasn’t a client ten minutes after I discovered that.
Just the fact that data centre operators look after their computers is a compelling argument for businesses moving onto the cloud, or at least putting their servers in a colocation facilities where professionals can look after the environment.
Like us, computers work best when they’re comfortable. If you can’t look after them, then it’s time to consider giving the work to someone who can.