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Thinking of following Facebook and going DIY? Think again

Brand new data centre off the shelf? Suits you, sir

DIY vs COTS: Part 1 Microsoft is doing it, Apple is doing it – so is IBM. The giants are spending billions of dollars building fantastic data centres.

But what about the rest of us? Do you walk in the footsteps of the giants and Do It Yourself (DIY) or buy something Commercial, Off The Shelf (COTS): it's an ages-old debate.

The former demands prototyping, experience in proof-of-concept design and lots of QA testing. With COTS, vendors take care of that – at a price. So who should be engaging in which approach?

Before we go too far down the rabbit hole, here it should be mentioned that both DIY and COTS are pretty broad categories. Not only can each category encompass the efforts of businesses of all sizes, the discussion is as much about software as it is hardware, and everything is always a moving target.

Let's examine the argument in stages and see how it plays in different areas of the market and how the same old arguments crop up, even when designing at the level of entire data centres.

PC versus console

While I know the "PC versus console" wars are about as far removed from the mind of your average data centre administrator as is possible, there are lessons to be learned here. PC versus console is the DIY versus COTS argument writ large, with all the micro and macro-economic arguments already played out in a technology market directly adjacent to that occupied by data centres.

The most basic representation of the DIY computer nerd is the traditional PC gamer. The PC gamer will obsess over reviews for everything from motherboards and CPUs to video cards and even mice. Spreadsheet upon spreadsheet will be made to juggle parts selection against budget.

The PC gamer will agonise over every single trade-off. The next-step-up video card might give more frames per second in their favourite shooter, but would they be less frustrated if they went for the bigger SSD instead, and got better loading times between levels?

Or was the game engine created by jerks, meaning none of it matters anyway because it will all run like crap, no matter how much hardware you throw at it?

The console gamer will just go to a store and buy a console, getting whatever the console maker decided upon. No fuss, no muss, but pitifully few choices on a number of fronts.

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