I have a consulting client who has engaged me to look at their infrastructure and do some analysis and then make a recommendation on either:
1. Hiring their own full-time sysadmin to re-architect everything and move it to an in-house virtualized environment. or 2. Outsourcing the whole works to Rackspace and get out of the business of owning hardware, paying a colo for a rack, and bringing on a full-time sysadmin. They would consider looking at someone other than Rackspace also but a friend of the owner talked up Rackspace as a way to solve a lot of their problems so that is who we are looking at first. The company has around 20 servers (a few web servers, a few db servers, misc. other things, a pretty typical mix) and provides a web-based service. They also take credit cards to the tune of around 65,000 transactions per year. PCI compliance is an issue and they want to aim towards being PCI compliant. Right now they are far from it. They will need firewalls, separate network segments, a NIDS, logfile monitoring, the whole works. They also want some shared storage behind the virtual environment so they can do vm migrations etc. They currently have two developers who have been doing the sysadmin work but a lot of necessary work has been deferred and they do not have much experience in building a scalable/secure system. Pros for moving to Rackspace: 1. Fully managed so sysadmin is someone else's headache/no need to hire a full-time sysadmin. 2. Potentially lower cost. 3. Economies of scale might make things cheaper. 4. They claim to have domain experts in all of the applicable fields. 5. They claim to have some PCI services which we could leverage. 6. No more owning hardware, paying colo, trips to colo, etc. Cons against moving to Rackspace: 1. Maybe they can't really provide the level of service that is required or if they can it might be quite extensive. 2. Don't have the attention of your own full-time sysadmin. 3. If it is really a full-time sysadmin worth of work it will probably be more expensive to pay for all of that sysadmin time from Rackspace plus their overhead. 4. Once we are migrated over they've got us by the short and curlies as migrating out is far from trivial. 5. No one person with full knowledge of the whole operation who can be called 24/7. 6. If they can't really implement full PCI we are stuck. I'm sure there are many others, these are just the things I can think of off the top of my head. I am about to place a call to Rackspace and discuss these issues with them and get their take on it. I must approach this with a completely open mind and put aside my own biases and personal opinions. Whichever way I go I have to be prepared to make a good case for it. I wanted to see if anyone out there has experience in this area and might be able to help my research by suggesting based on their experiences whether this is a realistic strategy which might actually save money/improve reliability or whether it is unreasonable to think that someone like Rackspace could really provide such an extensive level of service cheaper/better than a very good in-house sysadmin might. Thoughts? -- Tracy Reed http://tracyreed.org
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