Private Clouds Gaining Momentum
Well its been an interesting few weeks for cloud computing, mostly in the “private cloud” space. Microsoft have announced their Windows Azure Appliance enabling you to buy a Windows Azure cloud solution in a box (well actually many boxes as it comprises of hundreds of servers) and also the OpenStack cloud offering continues to grow in strength with RackSpace releasing its cloud storage offering under Apache 2.0 license with the OpenStack project.
OpenStack is an initiate to provide open source cloud computing and contains many elements from various organisations (Citrix, Dell etc) but the core offerings are Rackspace’s storage solution and the cloud compute technology behind NASA’s Nebula Cloud platform. To quote their web site…
“The goal of OpenStack is to allow any organization to create and offer cloud computing capabilities using open source software running on standard hardware. OpenStack Compute is software for automatically creating and managing large groups of virtual private servers. OpenStack Storage is software for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of commodity servers to store terabytes or even petabytes of data.”
It is exciting to see OpenStack grow as more vendors outsource their offerings and integrate them into the OpenStack initiative. It provides an opportunity to run your own open source private cloud that will eventually enable you to consume the best of breed offerings from various vendors based on the proliferation of common standards.
Meanwhile Microsoft’s Azure Appliance is described as …
“…a turnkey cloud platform that customers can deploy in their own datacentre, across hundreds to thousands of servers. The Windows Azure platform appliance consists of Windows Azure, SQL Azure and a Microsoft-specified configuration of network, storage and server hardware. This hardware will be delivered by a variety of partners.”
Whilst this is initially going to appeal to service providers wanting to offer Azure based cloud computing to their customers, it is also another important shift towards private clouds.
These are both examples in my eyes of the industry stepping closer to private clouds becoming a key presence in the enterprise and this will doubtless lead to the integration of public and private clouds. It shows the progression from hype around what cloud might offer, to organisations gaining real tangible benefits from the scalable and flexible cloud computing platforms that are at home inside or outside of the private data centre. These flexible platforms provide real opportunities for enterprises to deploy, run, monitor and scale their applications on elastic commodity infrastructure regardless of whether this infrastructure is housed internally or externally.
The debate on whether ‘Private clouds’ are true cloud computing can continue and whilst it is true that they don’t offer the ‘no- capital upfront’ expenditure and pay as you go model I personally don’t think that excludes them from the cloud computing definition. For enterprises and organisations that are intent on running their own data centres in the future there will still be the drive for efficiencies as there is now, perhaps more so to compete with competitors utilising public cloud offerings. Data centre owners will want to reduce the costs of managing this infrastructure, and will need it to be scalable and fault tolerant. These are the same core objectives of the cloud providers. It makes sense for private clouds to evolve based on the standards, tools and products used by the cloud providers. the ability to easily deploy enterprise applications onto an elastic infrastructure and manage them in a single autonomous way is surely the vision for many a CTO. Sure the elasticity of the infrastructure is restricted by the physical hardware on site but the ability to shut down and re-provision an existing application instance based on current load can drive massive cost benefits as it maximises the efficiency of each node. The emergence of standards also provides the option to extend your cloud seamlessly out to the public cloud utilising excess capacity from pubic cloud vendors.
The Windows Azure ‘Appliance’ is actually hundreds of servers and there is no denying the fact that cloud computing is currently solely for the big boys who can afford to purchase hundreds or thousands of servers, but it won’t always be that way. Just as with previous computing paradigms the early adopters will pave the way but as standards evolve and more open source offerings such as OpenStack become available more and more opportunities will evolve for smaller more fragmented private and public clouds to flourish. For those enterprises that don’t want to solely use the cloud offerings and need to maintain a small selection of private servers the future may see private clouds consisting of only 5 to 10 servers that connect to the public cloud platforms for extra capacity or for hosted services. The ability to manage those servers as one collective platform offers efficiency benefits capable of driving down the cost of computing.
Whatever the future brings I think that there is a place for private clouds. If public cloud offerings prove to be successful and grow in importance to the industry then private clouds will no doubt grow too to compliment and integrate those public offerrings. Alternatively if the public cloud fails to deliver then I would expect the technologies involved to still make their way into the private data centre as companies like Microsoft move to capitalise on their assets by integrating them into their enterprise product offerings. Either way then, as long as the emergence of standards continues as does the need for some enterprises to manage their systems on site, the future of private cloud computing platforms seems bright. Only time will tell.