Welcome!

Cloud Expo Authors: Elizabeth White, Pat Romanski, Jeremy Geelan, Mike Benkovich, Udayan Banerjee

Related Topics: Cloud Expo

Cloud Expo: Article

Cloud Computing: What Are Private Clouds?

"Cloud privatization" is on the rise

Jian Zhen's Blog

The world of clouds these days is full of definitions and counter-definitions. There are many posts that try to define the concept of cloud computing; many that try to distinguish utility computing, grid computing and cloud computing; many that try to define public vs private clouds; and many that dismisses the notion of private clouds.

John Foley, in his article “The Rise Of Enterprise-Class Cloud Computing“, referred to private cloud as an oxymoron,

That’s an oxymoron since cloud computing, by definition, happens outside of the corporate data center, but it’s the technology that’s important here, not the semantics.

But by whose definition? The industry as a whole haven’t even been able to nail down a concrete definition of cloud computing. Given that there’s no concrete definition, then by definition, private cloud is not an oxymoron. But I do agree with John, let’s focus on the technology and not the semantics.

Geva Perry, chief marketing officer at GigaSpace Technologies, did just that. By focusing on the technology and architectural aspects of cloud computing, he wrote in a GigaOM blog post,

Cloud computing is a broader concept than utility computing and relates to the underlying architecture in which the services are designed. It may be applied equally to utility services and internal corporate data centers, as George Gilder reported in a story for Wired Magazine titled The Information Factories.

Cloud Attributes

But instead of everyone trying to create their own definition of clouds, let’s look at the list of attributes that clouds have and compare public and private clouds.

  • Elasticity: The ability to dynamically provision (expand) or de-provision (shrink) the computing capacity as needed.
  • Utility: The ability to be charged by the amount of resources used. Great examples would include Amazon Web Services’ charge model. In an enterprise setting, sometimes business units are charged by the internal IT groups for the resources they requested. The utility model would allow IT groups to perform chargebacks in a similar model to AWS.
  • Scalability: The ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged. For example, it can refer to the capability of a system to increase total throughput under an increased load when resources (typically hardware) are added. [ via wikipedia ]
  • Reliability & Availability: No failed whale! The cloud infrastructure and platforms must be reliable and available to the applications that are using them. There’s probably a lot of technology involved here to make this happen. For example, the ability to transparently migrate a virtual server when the running node has failed.
  • Manageability: The ability to effectively manage (start/stop/migrate/expand/shrink/etc) the different server and application instances in the cloud.
  • Security: The ability to secure the data and access to the cloud. Public clouds still have a trust issue with many of the enterprise customers, which is why the ? is there.
  • Performance: The ability to execute and complete tasks within the acceptable timeframe (defined by the SLA).
  • API: I consider this to be a desired attribute. This refers to the ability of doing resource management via some type of documented programming interface.
  • Virtualization: Applications are decoupled from the underlying hardware. Multiple applications can run on one computer (virtualization a la VMWare) or multiple computers can be used to run one application (grid computing). [ via GigaOM ]
  • Multi-Tenancy: The ability to house multiple customers using the same infrastructure and still be able to segregate the data.
  • SLA-Driven: The system is dynamically managed by service-level agreements that define policies such as how quickly responses to requests need to be delivered. If the system is experiencing peaks in load, it will create additional instances of the application on more servers in order to comply with the committed service levels — even at the expense of a low-priority application. [ via GigaOM ]
  • Support: The ability to smack someone upside the head when something fails.

      Attributes Public Private
      Elasticity
      Utility
      Scalability
      Reliability & Availability
      Security ?
      Performance
      API
      Virtualization
      Multi-Tenant
      SLA-Driven ?
      24×7 Support

So if we are looking purely from a technology perspective, private clouds can absolutely exist. In fact, given the questions for the public cloud, enterprises are more likely to experiment with private clouds for mission critical applications.

Market and Vendors

According to Merrill Lynch, the public and private cloud infrastructure, platform, applications and advertising together will be a $160 billion market by 2011, or roughly 12% of the total worldwide software market.

The total $160bn addressable market opportunity includes $95billion in
business and productivity apps, and another $65 billion in online advertising.

IBM and Sun have comprehensive solutions for ‘internal Clouds’. Dell targets large scale data centers, and HP provides ‘everything as a service’, making their solutions attractive for ‘external Clouds’.

So who are some of the private cloud infrastructure/platform startups that are taking advantage of this $160 billion market? (Feel free to leave a comment if I missed anyone.)

    Company Product
    3Tera AppLogic
    Arjuna Agility
    Cassatt Active Response?
    Elastra Elastra Cloud Server
    Enomaly Enomalism
    GigaSpaces XAP, EDG, and Community Edition

     

More Stories By Jian Zhen

Jian Zhen, CISM, CISSP, is the Director of Cloud Solutions at VMware. He is responsible for working with the world’s largest service providers to design cloud infrastructures and platforms, and creating partner ecosystems for the clouds. Previously, he was the VP of Emerging Technologies at LogLogic, the log management and intelligence leader in San Jose, Calif. At LogLogic, he was responsible for the overall vision and strategy of LogLogic’s product lines. Prior to joining LogLogic, he was responsible for developing the Managed Security Services infrastructure for Exodus/Savvis. During his 12+ years career in the information security field, he has performed audits for many Fortune 1000 companies as an IT auditor with Ernst & Young and Charles Schwab. In his spare time, Jian also writes a variety of topics covering cloud computing, IT security, intellectual property protection, and managed services. You can also find him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Comments (0)

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.


Cloud Expo Breaking News
According to a 2011 survey by the Independent Oracle User Group, over 50% of Oracle’s customers have deployed or are considering deploying private clouds. Most private clouds today support non-production workloads because enterprises are unable to deploy mission-critical applications in their private cloud. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Anand Akela, Sr. Principal Product Director at Oracle, will discuss how the same Oracle technology that powers the Oracle Public Cloud e...
The impact of Big Data is extremely broad for business, information management and technology. Being able to analyze your growing mountain of data can give you a distinct competitive advantage, but Big Data can be more than traditional tools can handle. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, John Igoe, Executive Director of Cloud and Big Data Solutions at Dell, will discuss how Dell Apache Hadoop Solutions can help by providing super-fast analysis, data mining and processing.
With BigDataExpo 2012 New York (www.BigDataExpo.net), co-located with 10th Cloud Expo, now just three weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are t...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now just three weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
Whether your company is large or small, you are probably exploring Big Data solutions and using cloud services and will need to integrate with other enterprise workloads. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Gwyn Clay, CEO of Stonebranch, will share detailed information about how their customers are already integrating Workload Automation with tools like Hadoop, and running workloads completely in the cloud using a modern enterprise-wide workload automation solution that is 100...
What do the CTOs of the CIA and the U.S. Dept. of Justice and the CIO of the National Reconnaissance Office have in common with the CEOs of Eucalyptus, GoGrid, ActiveState, Appcara, OpSource and Nortonworks, the CTOs of Rackspace, SoftLayer, SOA Software and AppZero, the Founder & General Manager of Dell Boomi, the VP of Big Data & Streams at IBM and the Chief Strategy Officer at Pacific Controls? Answer: all are shortly to present breakout sessions as members of the distinguished Speaker Facul...
As a Platinum Plus Sponsor of Cloud Expo New York, Rackspace Hosting is offering special passes to SYS-CON's 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. Rackspace Hosting is the service leader in cloud computing, and a founder of OpenStack, an open source cloud operating system. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support® to its customers and partners, across a portfolio of IT services, including Manage...
The move to cloud-based applications has undeniably delivered tremendous benefits. However, the associated distribution creates various challenges from the quality perspective: End-to-end tests need to pass through multiple dependent systems, which are commonly unavailable, evolving, or difficult-to-access for testing. Accessing such systems often involves transaction and bandwidth fees. Teams need to test and tune the system under test against a realistic and broad range of performance and ...
In this CTO Power Panel at the 10th International Cloud Expo, moderated by Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan, industry-leading CTOs & VPs of Technology will discuss such topics as: Which do you think is the most important cloud computing standard still to tackle? Who should and shouldn’t be using a PaaS product today, and why? Can a public cloud ever be truly secure? How important is open source to cloud computing and Big Data? "Mission-critical apps are now safe in the cloud." Tr...
For many of the same reasons that Software-as-a-Service is catching on with enterprise buyers, delivering web services on top of Infrastructure-as-a-Service architectures is appealing to the SaaS developers. Operational agility, lower CapEx, and a broad array of tools and services are on tap that make both public and private IaaS clouds a great platform to build on. But how do you do this securely, especially in the public cloud where you have no access to the network or hypervisor your servers ...