Welcome to our new weekly feature “Cloudy Wednesdays”. Each Wednesday, Evolving Solutions will focus on the latest news and information on cloud computing.
We continue today with a look at private cloud computing deployment options as talked about in a recent joint presentation with Evolving Solutions and IBM’s Chief Strategist, Don Cotey. In an IBM study, over half of U.S. companies are expressing high interest in adopting many workloads in either public or private clouds.
Private cloud deployments with IT capabilities provided “as a service” over an intranet, within the client and behind the firewall offer two deployment options:
Client owned and operated private clouds on the client’s premises
Client owned but third-party operated
Check back next Wednesday, September 7th for a look at hybrid and public cloud computing deployments.
Welcome to our new weekly feature “Cloudy Wednesdays”. Each Wednesday, Evolving Solutions will focus on the latest news and information on cloud computing.
In a recent joint presentation by Evolving Solutions and IBM’s Chief Strategist, Don Cotey, we discussed the five deployment options for enterprise cloud computing. In the following weeks we will highlight the aspects of each deployment.
Today, cloud computing is fast gaining traction and is the logical ‘next step’ from virtualization. Here are the five deployment models as seen by IBM for cloud computing:
Client managed private cloud
Third-party operated, client owned private cloud
Third party owned and operated private cloud
Share cloud services
Public cloud services
Check back Wednesday, August 31st for a deeper dive into each cloud computing deployment.
An article published today in ComputerWorld discusses the differences between Server Virtualization and implementing a Private Cloud.
Analyst, Bill Claybrook, explains how Server Virtualization is an important building block for creating a private cloud. Part of the building process is capacity planning, that is, figuring out what happens when you add servers and other resources to the cluster as needed to keep up with business demand. Most organizations are not good at monitoring and keeping ahead of capacity. It’s somewhat of a balancing act to ensure that you have sufficient, but not too much, capacity on the data center floor.
When it comes to security, the way in which firewalls are handled in traditional data centers is not going to always work in cloud environments where workloads can be moved around. In a virtualized environment, servers may be organized into different security groups, and the security of the target host may not be satisfactory for a virtual machine (VM) being migrated to it.
Organizations that take on the task of deploying a private cloud are generally doing it to lower costs and provide more agile provisioning. However, many of the processes and procedures that have been used in data centers for many years require changes. IT organizations have many processes and requirements in the provisioning process, including budget requirements, discussions with storage, network and server groups — and lots of paperwork. These methods are directly opposed to the streamlined, short-duration provisioning associated with private cloud computing using automation and orchestration.
Posted on September 13th, 2010 by Judie Van Keulen
In the past couple of weeks, we’ve talked about public clouds vs. private clouds, but what about a combination of the two?
A hybrid cloud includes a variety of public and private options with multiple providers. By spreading things out over a hybrid cloud, you keep each aspect of your business in the most efficient environment possible. The downside is that you have to keep track of multiple different security platforms and ensure that all aspects of your business can communicate with each other.
Experts believe that the future is in private cloud computing, and there has been a recent rush to implement hybrid public/private clouds in an effort to become closer to the private model.
How does the hybrid model work? Software companies are teaming up with system integrators to bring internally managed clouds to enterprises.
For example, MomentumSI has combined software from three companies – New Scale, rPath and Eucalyptus – to provide what it calls a self-service private cloud offering. As a coalition, these companies can provide a single source solution that is simply not possible for public clouds providers on their own.
With a hybrid model, a company can use an SaaS application without security concerns. The SaaS vendor creates a private cloud inside the company’s firewall and provides a virtual private network (VPN) for additional security. If a company offers services to different vertical markets, it can use a public cloud to interact with clients, but keep their data secure within a private cloud. With security being a huge concern for public cloud computing, this hybrid option is extremely attractive.
There has been a lot of talk about private versus public clouds because of data security concerns. A private cloud is a proprietary network or data center that supplies hosted services to a limited number of people. Private clouds generally pose fewer security and privacy risks than public clouds.
What distinguishes private clouds from the average data center is the ability to pay-per-use and scale usage up or down as demand dictates. This scalability is made possible by the pooling of storage resources.
With cost and scalability being two important business issues, private clouds are extremely attractive to many businesses. According to a recent InformationWeek survey, more than half of the business technology professionals interviewed said that “they’re either using private clouds (28%) or planning to do so (30%).” That said, there is still a lot of hesitation when it comes to implementing a private cloud environment. With a heavy technology investment needed, businesses quite rightfully are trying to determine whether the long-term savings will be worth the upfront investment.
Forrester Analyst, James Staten, believes that most businesses are not ready for an internal cloud because they “lack the experience and maturity to manage such an environment.” Staten says that “to be ready, they must first scale operational standardization, automation, and virtualization mountains.”
With automation and consolidation being best practices for running a better, more efficient data center, perhaps preparing for a private cloud will inadvertently help companies optimize their data center?
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