Is private cloud the next step for the data centre? The Register has constructed a lovely survey about Private Cloud, which will form the basis of a freely available report that will be published in the coming weeks. The survey is, admittedly quite a chunky, one-pager and will take maybe 10mins of your time. [We do quite a lot of studies with our readers and they’re all …
It certainly makes sense to run an AWS-like service in the datacenter of a company, as hardware can be utilized more efficiently. It is basically an extension of virtualization, which has been done for a very long time in the mainframe environments.
But maximum economy of scale can only be derived by sharing these hardware resources with many other companies. Think of running complex analysis jobs once a week on 100 powerful machines, which you rent for just one day and which are idle otherwise. Think of using a public cloud as a Disaster Recovery Resource. Sharing the latter with 100 other companies is clearly more efficient than having a second datacenter in your own operation.
Until the same disaster hits all the companies using it at the same time, and the DR service goes titsup under the (over)load.
There's a reason why the DR professionals manage this sort of shared backup site carefully, with geographic assignment of resources and prioritized SLAs.
Agreed!
public cloud: If you do not necessarilly know what data centre in what country your data is currently stored, it is surely negligent for any business to use such a "fuzzy" service for the processing of any kind of PII data.
private cloud: Nothing but an updated term for managed hosting
I'll admit there are lots of useful things you can do with "cloudy" services; but the ones jumping on this particular bandwagon are the headcount-shedding, cost-cutting, bean-counters who'll be the first baying for blood when data is lost or services not available.
The "cloud" is a great solution to Amazon's problem of "how to pay for enough server capacity to handle the Christmas rush; and what to do with them for the other 355 days". I'm not sure it's worth betting the farm on for most businesses.
(Fucking hell; I'm coming across as a right luddite!)
What I'm looking forward to is 'mixed mode cloud'. Rather than running multiple racks in multiple DC, instead we run one rack in one DC, which has our own cloud stack on it, running the services that need to run 24x7.
In multiple other DCs, running on 3rd party cloud stacks, we have the spare capacity that was sitting in our 3 racks. We can spin up more of them as needed, or spin them down when it is quiet. When we have a failure in our own DC, we have 3-4 fallback locations ready to spin into life.
Ideally, we end up paying much less per month on hosting.
I have very little experience with movable workloads in clouds or other fluffy nonsense - would it be possible though to make a cloud that is compatible with amazons so if say the private cloud fails or is overloaded, it can then expand into amazon? thus you get just the smallest service available with amazon but build you own cloud in a dc somewhere at much lower cost. If it goes titsup then if kept in sync with aws it just glides on over .. is this possible at all?
Not sure amazon would like that usage profile if it expanded hehe...
There are two issues for me (these are strictly my opinion and not to be taken as fact !)
1) security is still in its infancy regarding private clouds
2) pricing models for creating cloud is a nightmare , I have been down the road a couple of times from the provider side and it either requires a large investment or a willing rich customer
Private Cloud is a blanket marketing term for where on-site computing is in its evolution. It is just like phases that have gone before it, so now its Private Cloud. Virtualized, automated, self-service products and architectures. This progression has been happening for years. A couple things that are new however, is the intersection of Moore's Law and high speed networks. Solutions can be accomplished much faster and in much smaller form factors than ever before. Case in point - CriKit Desktop Private Cloud http://www.crikit.info The application of low wattage micro-servers to run a Private Cloud ON your desk. Pretty damn sweet, if you are into that sort of thing ...
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