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Private Clouds Must Be Agile
1. Private Clouds Must Be Agile
Filed in Cloud Industry Insights by Ben Kepes | September 11, 2012 9:00 am
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I recently read a well reasoned post[3] by HP’s Cloud CIO Christian Verstraete. In the post Verstraete
reflected on a Twitter exchange he’d had responding to the claims by someone that private cloud was a myth.
The private/public debate has raged for a few years now and the two sides go something like this:
Opponents of private cloud say that private is a myth because it doesn’t deliver the efficiencies and
abstraction of non-core activity that public cloud brings. These folks are adamant that private cloud
cannot compete with the economics, the scale, the pure focus and the benefits that public cloud
delivers.
Proponents of private cloud, however, say that for some organizations – legislative requirements,
compliance issues, existing investments or simply internal reluctance make public cloud adoption
difficult — private cloud delivers many of the benefits while still meeting the “bottom line” of the
organization
To put it into context, my definition of cloud uses the acronym OSSM. That is, to be considered cloud an
asset should be on-demand, scalable, self-service and measured. As long as it meets these requirements, I’m
relaxed about calling it cloud. So a virtualization product on its own, for example, isn’t cloud because it
doesn’t deliver on the self-service and measured parts of the requirement.
So when is private cloud valid?
My key requirement for clouds is that they deliver on self-service and metering. My belief is that over time
organizations will move to a model that seeks to very accurately identify IT costs, and report them alongside
revenue figures. In order to do so, it is important that any service utilized is measurable on a per-unit basis.
So, no, virtualization does not equate to cloud. But a coherent strategy of virtualization alongside automation,
self-service and scale is cloud, even if it happens to occur on-premise.
But can private = scale?
This part of the discussion tends to drop into a semantic argument. Opponents of private cloud suggest that a
fundamental requirement of cloud is the ability to scale and that, in the event that infrastructure resides on-
premise, that scaling is therefore limited. I believe that this view is shortsighted. All infrastructure, after all,
has limitations. It is conceivably possible to max out the total infrastructure available from any cloud vendor.
Sure, it would take an unbelievably massive workload to do it, but it’s possible – cloud, after all, sits on real
hardware somewhere. The key thing here is that for an enterprise scale means the realistic scale requirements
of an individual business unit. If I run a particular department within BigCo, I don’t need to know that my
company’s infrastructure can scale to map the human genome (unless of course that’s the particular
requirement I have). All I need to know is that it can meet my particular requirements. Across an entire
organization the kind of benefits that public cloud vendors can enjoy from different customers having usage
and peak requirements are also applicable – it’s unlikely that every department within BigCo has its peak