Please....What is a private cloud?

Private cloud (also called internal cloud or corporate cloud) is a marketing term for a proprietary computing architecture that provides hosted services to a limited number of people behind a firewall.

Advances in virtualization and distributed computing have allowed corporate network and datacenter administrators to effectively become service providers that meet the needs of their "customers" within the corporation.

Marketing media that uses the words "private cloud" is designed to appeal to an organization that needs or wants more control over their data than they can get by using a third-party hosted service such as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud EC2 or Simple Storage Service S3.

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Predictably, no early private cloud adopters (none that I've heard of, anyway) have made the quixotic attempt to turn their entire infrastructure into a private cloud. Instead, they have identified certain areas where the cloud model makes sense, such as dev and test, a low-risk use case we've heard about for awhile.

IBM ventured into this area over a year ago with its WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance, which is basically a blade server preconfigured for Java dev and test that lets developers self-provision resources through a Web interface, with metering of those resources built in.

At VMworld, HP jumped into the private cloud feet first with its CloudStart solution, which combines hardware (HP BladeSystem Matrix), software (HP Cloud Service Automation), and professional services (HP Cloud Consulting) to yield private cloud deployments within 30 days. Rather than dev and test, HP is focusing on delivering business applications as private cloud "services," from Microsoft Exchange to Oracle PeopleSoft to SAP Business Objects.

You can argue, of course, that this is just another prepackaged deal of the type consultancies have been offering for years. The main difference is that so much cloudy stuff comes in the big honking blade server package -- virtual machine management, auto-provisioning, virtualization-based disaster recovery, chargeback, and so on.

A multipurpose appliance is one way to skin the private cloud. But if you ask me, the most interesting emerging use case for the private cloud is what you might call the "partner cloud." Just as a decade ago companies began offering Web portals for their customers and partners, with Web forms for managing accounts and ordering new goods or services, partner clouds actually deliver services.

At VMworld, both Sabre Holdings and Siemens talked about their partner cloud solutions. "Sabre is building customized solutions for various airlines," said Raghu Raghuram, VMware's senior vice president and general manager for virtualization and cloud platforms. "They want to shorten the cycle for building it, showing it, selling it," using private clouds managed by vCloud Director, VMware's new cloud management solution.

Siemens, which Raghuram terms a "quasi service provider," has a pilot project called the Secure Virtual TestCenter, in which the company has "set up environments for its partners," also with the aid of vCloud Director.

So on the one hand, the private cloud is just another step toward the commodification of IT, where internal customers pick from a menu of metered services across a virtualized infrastructure, rather than specifying the nth requirement for custom deployments that tie up resources forever.

On the other hand, one of the most exciting use cases for the private cloud is the ability for enterprises to establish quasi-public clouds for partners, which may accelerate business-to-business e-commerce in unanticipated ways.

Without question, the private cloud comes with a large dose of hogwash.

Nonetheless, the model of providing commodity services on top of pooled, well-managed virtual resources has legs, because it has the potential to take a big chunk of cost and menial labor out of the IT equation. The lights in the data center will never go out. The drive for greater efficiency, though, has had a dozen names in the history of IT, and the private cloud just happens to be the latest one.

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Private Cloud aka Internal Cloud or Corporate Cloud

What is it, how it can be used, how can you benefit from it – all those scenarios and hundreds more are explained everywhere.

My intention is not to detaily describe Private Cloud or Cloud Computing. My intention is to describe private cloud as easy as it gets, preferably with „real“ world comparison. Also, keep in mind that there are a few Private Cloud „offerings“, and that herby I’m talking about IAAS – Infrastructure as a Service.

Ok first what does that (IAAS) mean? Let’s analyze those two words; infrastructure and service. In IT world infrastructure is actually combination of following resources: memory, CPU, storage, networking,operating system etc.. Ok now we have also a service which can be defined as „ providing something to someone“.

So it’s clear that IAAS is actually a model where someone provides infrastructure services to someone else. Keyword here is someone, because if this someone is public company providing services to some other company – then this can be „normal Public Cloud“. On the other hand if for example one company provides infrastructure as a service to departments in that same company – then that can be called „Private Cloud“.

If we compare that to some plastic real world example it could be something like Rent a Car model. 

So, in the world there are a lot of Rent a Car companies in which you decide to go if you’d like some services [a Car]. You also decide that this particular car needs to have some amount of horse power, CCM, needs to have 4WD etc.

Then you pay for all that and you get that car as a service, exactly as you wanted, and fast too.

That could be compared to Public Cloud because some public company „host“ services (e.g. car) for you or your company. On the other hand, your company can have maybe dozen cars available for you and for other employees to use. You then explain why you need a car, when you need it and what kind of car you need. Your company provides you with that car so in that case you’d also get car as a service, but now this service is private.

Ok, now after that comparison, let’s see how can that Private IAAS Cloud be achieved in IT world. Of course, here virtualization (among other stuff) comes in place. Why? Well because of some main characteristics of cloud (whether public or private) :

• Scalability
• Automatism
• Elasticity

In other words, when you or your department need Windows Server 2008 R2 with 4 GB of RAM, 2 CPU’s, 100 GB disk and Active Directory Services role installed, you need that fast and without much intervention (you don’t want to configure everything by yourself). In other other words, if you’d need that same Windows Server 2008 R2, and if it can only be served to you in a physical manner (a.k.a real metal physical server), you would probably not get it in that same automatic, fast and „elastic“ way.

So yeah, that’s about it in high level and without mentioning actual technologies used for building private cloud solution. My way of demystified Private Cloud and IAAS.