Do you have a private cloud?

Now that's a cloud!

I hear it day in and day out... "I already have a private cloud..."  "We virtualized our servers a couple years ago, so we have a private cloud."  I hate to tell you this but a virtual infrastructure is a virtual infrastructure not a private cloud.  "But that is a private cloud," you say...  Think again!

A private cloud has a few features that make it a private cloud.  A virtualized infrastructure is the foundation upon which you can build.  It is only the foundation.  So let's say you have a bunch of management tools that make your virtual infrastructure easy to manage, easy to deploy new machines, easy to patch, resilient, reliable and scalable.  What you have is a really well managed virtual infrastructure... which serves as... a foundation for a private cloud.

Read on to see what else it takes.


The features of a private cloud are these:
Service Catalog with Self Service and workflow
Capacity Planning and Management
Chargeback for consumed services

These features built on top of a well designed virtual infrastructure, integrated in a way that automates most day-to-day management tasks, move beyond just virtual infrastructure to private cloud.  The value of this type of solution is that it is designed to elicit every bit of capability and speed out of the environment at the lowest overall cost.  Of course there are a slew of software products required to build this functionality.  On top of that there is integration into the lower levels of hardware management and up into Business Intelligence analytics.

What this constitutes is a new way to think about IT.  It is no longer about what systems the business needs from IT, it is about what services IT provides to the business.  Private cloud is about users consumption of IT's offerings in a way that enables them to do better business faster.  All the while it ensures integrity of corporate policy and governance.

Along with this consumption model comes the need to develop new applications to take advantage of the management, provisioning and planning that is inherent in the private cloud.  Without the applications being tied in the environment offers only a portion of its overall value.

The big picture here is the tie in from the private cloud to public cloud providers in a way that allows you applications to maintain their integrity while bursting, balancing, recovering or migrating into or out of the public cloud.  This level of functionality can only exist if the integration points, management and applications are designed with this end goal in mind.  The benefit to doing all of this work is an environment that meets its service level agreements while providing the most cost effective way to offer the agility a business needs to be competitive.