A $300 Million dollar data center project to house IT operations for the state of Washington has come under fire by two state legislators as half-baked, inefficient and unsound. What's the alternative? Why, putting all of the state's data center operations "in the cloud", of course!

Cue: Circus music, dancing children and an end to all of humanity's ills

This is the part where the Big Brain appears but Leela arrives with an urgent message to Fry and saves the day, right? Right?

Calling the proposal a "$300 Million dollar mistake", Rep. Reuven Carlyle suggests that the state, "Utilize cloud services from commercial providers such as Google, Microsoft [ or ] Amazon."

So, you're just going to stick all the state IT in the cloud because in anecdote, it sounds less expensive? Heck, if this really is the future, why don't we outsource "the cloud" itself to a cloud computing company as well? There's really no need for any organization to own infrastructure at all! We'll just sign up for an Amazon S3 account, push the big magic "upload" button and call it a day. Problem solved!

Seriously, do these knee-jerk armchair IT guys think they're the first to look at saving money by not building a new data-center? Do they even understand that much of what the state likely runs would need massive rewriting, porting, new development and a huge testing effort to assure that this wouldn't just be a giant money-sucking fiasco?

According to the letter Carlyle sent to Washington Governor Gregoire, "Public sector IT experts predict that within just a few years up to 50% of government agencies nationwide will outsource most data to the cloud." If that's the reality, someone pass me the blue pill and put me out of my misery.

Cloud computing is certainly here to stay, there's no arguing against that. But, that doesn't mean the data-center is going the way of the Dodo bird. There's a pretty good reason you don't see the Fortune 500 rushing to do this with mission critical or customer facing operations; Control. As a consumer of government services, I should have the right not to worry about the ultimate safety, security and reliability of state data services. As idyllic as "the cloud" is in concept -- unlimited availability, ubiquitous hot and cold running backups and seemingly boundless performance -- the reality is quite different. It takes a massive amount of effort to make things look effortless.

This is more of an "offload" than a "download," but it's still a neat idea. Sun this week announced what they think is the future of data-centers: Project Blackbox. The basic idea is pretty simple. Instead of building data-centers in existing buildings, customers will be able to order prefab centers built into storage containers and delivered to a location of their choice pre-built and ready to plug in. A company could even put a Blackbox in in a "rack" at a specially designed col-lo facility, or use it as a remote command center. Think of it as PODS for IT. Sun claims that a single Blackbox could hold 250 Sun Fire T1000 boxes with a total of 2000 cores running 8000 simultaneous threads. Pretty impressive, although the storage figures seem a little low. Sun claims one Blackbox could provide 7TB of disk space, but it looks to me like there should be room for around for a few petabytes, maybe even an exabyte if you really shoehorned the RAIDs, considering even mid-range solutions can put 3.5TB in a single 4U enclosure these days.

No word on when Sun will start actually producing the units, if ever, but it's an interesting idea. I'd like to know what the water hook-up is for, though; I'd don't see anyone pulling one of these into the local RV park with a straight face.

[via Tao of Mac]

Edit:
It's nice to know I'm not going crazy. As Dan points out in the comments, the 7TB figure is for RAM, the storage capacity is 1.5PB, or 2PB of tape.