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I remember in kindergarten -- or was it first grade -- we were all taught to share. That’s fine when it comes to cookies and milk, but I’m not so sure about cloud computing.
In fact, were I a CIO, I’d be among the first in line to gain the potential benefits of cloud computing, but I’m not so sure I’d want to run my virtual servers entirely on a shared cloud infrastructure.
Instead, I’d be looking at private clouds, which are intended to deliver the benefits of cloud computing but are fully dedicated for the sole use of a specific customer.
What’s the appeal? For starters in-house clouds are less risky than the Internet-based cloud computing where, for one thing, sensitive data is exposed to a nebulous computer architecture. Cloud computing brings with it a whole host of new threats.. As Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers noted at a recent RSA security conference, "It (cloud computing) is a security nightmare and it can't be handled in traditional ways."
Significantly, the private cloud approach has gotten considerably attention of late from analysts and vendors. In fact, a number of solutions providers have recently announced private cloud offerings. On June 23, as an example, Telarus the telecoms service provider, introduced a private cloud computing platform based on VMware virtualisation software, EMC storage and IBM servers "We can provision a private cloud for the client where we can guarantee performance and we can guarantee security," Telerfus CEO Jules Rumsey said..
At last month’s EMC World EMC Chairman, President and CEO Joe Tucci predicted that virtualization will become the foundation for cloud computing and cited the emergence of private cloud computing as one of the mega trends shaping today’s IT industry.
“Traditional data centers are very static – each application has its own infrastructure – no matter what its workload,” said Tucci. “In a virtual data center, resources are provisioned as needed. This is the type of environment customers are bridging to today. The transformation to a private cloud – a dynamic, efficient, on-demand and flexible resource – is taking place now. There are very few, if any, applications that can’t work efficiently in a virtual or cloud environment and that is accelerating the move to virtualized data centers.”
Other vendors include REDPLAID and Connectria have also come out with private cloud offerings in recent months. REDPLAID is offering customized private cloud solutions while Connectria’s offering is aimed at its traditional enterprise-class customers. It will, Connectria claims, will enable customers to specify a custom configuration of virtualization software, servers and storage from a multitude of vendors, along with a customized approach for delivering managed services to each customer.
In a blog earlier this year Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman went so far as predict that in-house clouds might overshadow the external approach. “I believe that enterprises will spend more money building private cloud computing services over the next three years than buying services from cloud computing providers. But those investments will also make them better cloud computing customers in the future.”
Bittman continued, “Building a private cloud computing environment is not just a technology thing – it also changes management processes, organization/culture, and relationship with business customers (our Infrastructure and Operations Maturity Model has a roadmap for all four). And these changes will make it easier for an IT organization and its customers to make good cloudsourcing decisions and transitions in the future.We will even see several organizations evolve from being private cloud computing providers to becoming public cloud computing providers.”
Of course, being a private cloud user doesn’t preclude you from capitalizing on the shared approach. IBM has coined the term hybrid clouds, while Red Hat is beta testing an enterprise wide virtualization approach that will serve as the foundation for both private and external clouds, the best of both worlds, possibly.
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