If it costs $300,000/month just to deploy an evaluation rack why can't I just make life easy for my developers and ops people and put in a rack of my own servers?
I worked with a consultancy that was renting these yellow Google search appliances in ~2009. Google discontinued them shortly after, in true Google fashion.
Beyond marketing from being affiliated with Google, the hosted GDC brings little value, it appears.
Moreover, going with GDC feels like a huge business continuity risk.
