A brand-new data center for 5,000 companies - and no one noticed...

The benefits of cloud computing from an IT operations perspective are relatively well documented - the idea being that everything to do with running the software becomes the vendor's problem - but this weekend we had an extreme example of the beauty of cloud computing at Intacct that is I think informative.

At Intacct, we've been growing so fast that we were about to run out of power and space at our primary data center, which runs at an IBM facility. Our operations team has also not been entirely thrilled with some of the service and support we've been receiving from IBM, so we've known for a while it was time to upgrade.

After a thorough evaluation, we selected Savvis, and their tier one facility in San Jose, California. Savvis is also running applications for cloud computing leaders including salesforce.com, Adobe, SAP, amazon.com, and Workday, as well as for corporate giants like GE, Coca Cola, Thomson Reuters, Microsoft, P&G and eBay - so Intacct and our clients are in good company.  After the transition, our major data centers are with Savvis in California and with Sungard in Pennsylvania - and we have plenty of headroom matching our greater than 100% annual growth.

This weekend, we upgraded 5,000 customers to our brand new facility at Savvis. Our operations team have been preparing and practicing for the upgrade for nearly a year, we purchased and installed all new and upgraded hardware and we notified all of our users and partners of the pending upgrade well in advance.

The actual switchover took place over a three hour window last Friday night, plus a one hour window on Saturday night. That's it - just a few hours of scheduled downtime and everyone was back up and running, just better and faster than before.

And here's the best part - We had one support call this morning related to the transition - that's it, across more than 5,000 companies, more than 30,000 business entities and tens of thousands of users that were upgraded. When people came into work this Monday morning, all that our clients noticed is faster performance than they saw last Friday - everything else is entirely transparent to them. 

I can't think of a better statement about the IT value of cloud computing - 5,000 customers automatically upgraded to a new and better facility, with all new and much faster servers, state of the art hardware and upgraded network connectivity - and all totally transparent and at no incremental cost or effort to any customer. 

Can you imagine in the old world of on-premises software what would have happened if 5,000 companies all swapped out their data centers (or even just replaced their hardware) for their ERP system themselves - the time and expense, the number of upgrades that would have failed, the amount of downtime that would have been incurred?

I hope you agree this is a great example of why cloud computing is just that much better.