Yes!! The level of outsourcing the whole data center is long advocated by Gartner (http://www.gartner.com/research/spr/attributes/attr_120728_429.pdf) and big player including IBM are offering their services (http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/index.wss/offerfamily/bps/a1028102).
Now, for sure, outsourcing the whole data center including helpdesk isn’t everyone’s ballgame.
As an example, we usually serves our users who are primarily construction engineers and their input/output files are Autocad/3D design files, expanding sometimes to 10-15 MB per file located on SANs. We have edge to core switch bandwidth of 4GB and that’s just suffcient, we are seriously looking at enhanciing the stacked switches on each floor to a 10G uplink to our datacenter core / distribution switches. Then there are ERP systems requiring file uploads/downloads routinely.
Now, is this datacenter outsourcing for me? Can I look into publishing all my servers at some remote outsourced datacenter and publish all my Autocad services on a citrix farm and have a 10Mb telecom link between by office to remote datacenter?
How are other guys managing such outsourced services?
Just looking around for some experiences.
Rgds
