One factor driving the cost reductions that many see in the public cloud is scale; massive data centers create economies of scale from which both the data center operators and their customers derive benefit. Wikibon published an infographic last week to illustrate this, suggesting that 1,000 servers in a ‘traditional’ data center cost $3,350,000 to run compared to $798,000 to run 1,000 servers inside a 100,000 server ‘budget’ cloud facility. Staff savings are particularly notable in Wikibon’s graphic, but it’s worth remembering that this is a snapshot and that every data center is different. You may see higher savings in your own case; or none at all.