After having a few beers tonight (Dogfish Burton. Yummy!), I got to thinking about the sheer compute power available at a data center, like the new one the NSA is building out the desert in Utah. Turning that around, and using it ,instead, as a resource for small to medium sized businesses and universities, could such an endeavor ever become profitable? Obviously the specifics of the system haven't been revealed, except that 3-12 exabytes of storage would be available in the short-term.
Assuming you could get enough servers, GPUs, internal network infrastructure, storage space, insane amounts of bandwidth in and out of the facility, electricity, and cooling, along with the requisite virtualization to divy up compute and storage resources amongst customers, does anyone here envision customers actually being willing to trust their data (and putting their business on the line) with an entity that would provide all the infrastructure they would need, allowing them to merely connect a terminal over a WAN connection to their own private "cloud", while everything else is taken care of for them seamlessly in the background?
Any thoughts/ideas?
/Sorry about the giant run-on sentence!