Private Clouds, a new area of computing science
June 25, 2009 – 11:04 am
We all know that the phrase Cloud Computing is heavily abused by technology companies. Due to its broad definition it can be applied to a huge array of technology products and services. Many companies have simply re-invented themselves as ‘cloud’ providers by adding the badge to their existing services in the same way that whole industries have jumped on the ‘green’ bandwagon. Cloud Computing can be used to describe a very wide area of activity from SaaS to IaaS through PaaS, a huge array of activity.
While it is very easy to hitch a ride on the cloud computing bandwagon, it is almost impossible to use the Private Cloud badge properly. Private Clouds are a completely new area of computing that only existed in the IT departments of extremely large IT departments until recently.
A Private Cloud is a proprietary computing architecture that provides hosted services to a limited number of people behind a corporate firewall. It is an infrastructure that allows IT and datacenter administrators to effectively become service providers that meet the needs of their “customers” within the corporation.
Private Clouds are a new area of computing science where the application is treated as a service and is provided under an SLA and managed by an automated management system that adds and subtracts resources in a truly dynamic way. This same management system manages all the IT resources in the cloud ( routers, firewalls and servers) in such a way that they can be manipulated dynamically to ensure applications achieve their SLA.
True Private cloud deployments will allow IT departments to deploy applications and monitor usage and performance according to an SLA. Once the SLA is under threat the system should alter the environment to fit. This gets very complicated when you extend it to the network of a typical enterprise user. Suddenly the wheels fall off when you have to manage five departments and perhaps 100 internal applications!
Companies like Arjuna in Newcastle are pushing the bounds of this technology but it’s going to take a long time for this area to mature enough to become commoditised properly so that it can be used by SME’s. Rozmic is working with Arjuna to build a truly innovative Private Cloud for our usage and I hope that we will be able to release some of our research findings at the future CloudSeminar and CloudCamp events on 29th July.
[ I found the image used in this post on the Liquefying IT blog by The Enterprise Strategy Group]
