by Filip
8. November 2011 23:18
Around 2000 the magical term e-business used to pop up everywhere. You would see it in every IT-magazine, every commercial. IBM made e-servers, Cisco sold e-routers, service providers offered just about e-everything.
Now every other article promotes the Private Cloud as the magical Band-Aid. It gives me this déjà-vu feeling.
The Private Cloud has become the next hype. What does it stand for?
The Private Cloud is cloud-enabling technology (virtualization and distributed computing) in your private data center.
In a more classical approach the IT admin will manually set up virtual machines at the request of their end users. In a Private Cloud this process is automated. End users request a server through a self-service portal and minutes later their machine auto magically spins up. Not more or less. It is the logical next step in the evolution of virtualization technology.
True, this approach has considerable advantages. Users have access to their resources much faster without the intervention of IT personnel. But just how 'cloudy' is the Private Cloud? Let's check some basic characteristics of cloud computing.
- On-demand provisioning. Well, yes. from the user's point of view, their services are provisioned on demand. But that is provided you as IT department have the infrastructure in place.
- Utility computing or Elasticity. From a user point of view, yes, the provided service is definitely elastic. End users add and remove memory, storage, or processing power at their own request. But from the IT department's point of view, you still purchase and maintain the infrastructure required to cover for peak loads.
- Distributed Computing. Well, it depends. If today your data centers are geographically distributed and you can move servers around ad hoc, you are one step closer to a geographically distributed private cloud. You might as well use virtualization- and cloud technology in a single location.
From an end-user's point of view, the Private Cloud definitely looks and feels like a cloud. For the IT department, however, private clouds hold less promises than the commercials would like you to believe.
The dark side of the Private Cloud is this: you still own and maintain the infrastructure yourself. Whereas in a public cloud service you only pay for the services that you consume (processing power, storage, and bandwidth), in the Private Cloud you still install, patch, monitor, update, backup your infrastructure yourself. That means you still purchase and maintain servers, storage, network bandwidth, support contracts, housing, and power consumption. IT staff will spend less time setting up VMs on demand, but will spend a considerable amount of time enabling and supporting the Private Cloud service. The ability to set up a self-service portal and automate the process requires specialized software. I would carefully consider if the advantage of providing VMs in minutes instead of days is worth this effort.
Read David Chappell's view about the Microsoft Private Cloud.