Private cloud is NOT dead – and for one good reason: Control of data Reports that private clouds are dead are greatly exaggerated. Far from being dead, IDC’s latest research shows that private clouds are expected to grow at the same rate as public clouds for the next five years. This will not surprise anyone who has worked in or with an enterprise IT operation. Even public cloud giant AWS is …
Popes, bears... I was going to say something along those lines too.
But I was also going to say: thank you to the author for reminding readers that one size does not fit all, that even if public cloud was/is a massive opportunity, there are places (probably lots of places) where public cloud is a very very silly idea. Some of us know that. Others are more, how shall we say, gullible?
Have a lot of fun.
Yeah, there was really no reasonable reason to think "private clouds" would be dead. I mean, I know some pundits claimed it. But... 1) Most larger companies are going to keep running at least one data center, either exclusively or in combination with online services ("clouds"). 2) Said data centers are more and more likely to use virtual machines rather than dedicated servers, perhaps allow migration, may be moving towards using high availability filesystems rather than (or in addition to) RAID. That is, they are moving towards being run like a private cloud rather than a traditional server farm.
Everyone who needs to be online in a significant way should have their own private cloud. It's cheaper for baseline loads and easier to maintain. The big downside is trying to get fiber optic links in the US. There's no public infrastructure so you're hiring a telco to dig a trench through the streets just for you. Want a new telco? That's another trench. Maybe you can get point-to-point wireless if you're the tallest building.
I think that Private clouds have an important role and some companies are taking major risk putting all there data with another company that could turn them off.. Their business will have a long battle to get there data back...
The other problem with cloud systems is if there was a fabric breach... it would be tantamount to having the keys to the data centre... the more shared the cloud is, the higher the risk...
Its when you dumb ass management who buy into bullshit from sales people without understanding the risks...
1. Anyone who has worked in IT for a few years knows not to put all your eggs in one basket, never mind a basket that belongs to someone else. Economies of scale mean that hosted email or CRM (for example) are fine for some small companies, but most that I work with still have onsite file servers.
2. The person who felt it necessary to rename corporate networks as "private clouds" to get the industry's latest irritating buzzword into the title should have an umbrella inserted up their bottom. And then opened. Which will stop them talking anymore.
The best definition of "cloud computing" I've seen is a Dilbert cartoon - http://dilbert.com/strip/2012-10-21 - "Move some of [the software's] functions onto the internet, but call the internet a cloud"
So private cloud computing presumably means moving some of the functions onto the local area network.
Is there anyone out there who doesn't have a local area network? Maybe a self-employed plumber who runs his entire business from a single laptop, but anyone bigger than that is going to have a LAN.
Typically a "private cloud" is much more than just servers and includes "on demand" automated provisioning of servers, networking and storage. The administrator or developer shouldn't have to actually manage the infrastructure resources in a cloud environment which is very different from traditional environments.
Just because it's now called a cloud, with auto-provisioning, that doesn't stop end-users doing things like:
using all the disk space*
putting business critical data on non-backed up servers
surfing to porn sites from the domain controllers
etc, etc...
It still needs managing by someone. Do you really think the commercial off-premise cloud providers don't have staff managing the systems?
* If you have some magic "expand to AWS, so we never run out of disk space" enabled, you now have a problem of running out of money when the very large bill comes in.
Actually in a real cloud environment, you can enable policies so you don't provision all of the disk space or allow certain types of data to be accessible outside of security policies. This is exactly the difference between traditional infrastructures and cloud enabled.
> Actually in a real cloud environment, you can enable policies so you don't provision all of the disk space or ... exactly the difference between traditional infrastructures and cloud enabled.
Good job I'd just put down the coffee cup. Having policies like that are not exclusive to "cloud" - it really just isn't the difference at all.
Firstly, the original author makes the (typical of an HDS employee in my experience with them) mistake of ignoring APPLICATIONS. Apps are what drive cloud adoption - specifically Salesforce.com, but a slew of other ones as well. And those apps in large part do NOT work on private clouds, because the vendors cannot adequately support them. While some cloud-apps claim that they can run on private hardware, you are in large part losing much of the benefits of a cloud-based app vendor - namely, that they manage all of the upgrade and release headaches. And of having an app development and support team that is laser-focused on just supporting ONE version of the codebase, rather than mutant spawns of several legacy releases running in production on a variety of servers (which benefits customers by having hopefully a more function rich product or better pricing). So private clouds running "cloud" software is just another name for a services-enabled app running on your hardware....
Of course, being a box and data storage vendor, HDS insinuates that it is all about the data...but what really matters to most businesses is the value of the APPLICATIONS that run on the data....having petabytes is worthless if your staff have no business functionality from it.
Of course, many commenters here make the repeated mistake of thinking that clouds are the same as traditional server farms. They are not. Server farms do not have provisioning, and the management functions, that true "clouds" have. More importantly, server farms do not have the APIs and services layers that clouds have, which are the backbones of not just admin, but also entire application ecosystems if done right. Again, it is all about the applications, IMHO.
It is, alas, a cloudy subject....
APPLES meet ORANGES
Most enterprise tech types understand the difference between SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE (SaaS) and INFRASTRUCTURE AS A SERVICE (IaaS) although clearly you do not.
You are reiterating the biggest fallacy of dev/ops: It's not all about the application, it's all about running the business first and it's why dev/ops priorities are not always aligned to CIO priorities.
Get off your phone for a minute and take a walk through an enterprise business like a multi-national bank. That application they provide so you can check how much beer money you have from your phone is a small piece of the business operations they run. The hundreds of enterprise applications they are running have policies and data governance requirements that may not work for public clouds but may work nicely for hybrid and private clouds.
From a purely application-centric perspective, most large enterprises run a combination of SaaS (for apps like Salesforce) and IaaS for mission critical, data sensitive (or in the case of banks, latency sensitive broker) applications because their business requirements dictate that level of control.
If the cloud infrastructure is architected properly, it shouldn't matter if it's public, private or hybrid from an application development perspective.
Erm, I think it's you that don't get it.
It is easy to have your "application ecosystems" at the moment. That's full 'applications' created and running on a coherent, fully supported platform within a private cloud - Salesforce-style/SaaS if you like, with all the database management and update management automated. Even air-gapped should you wish.
So, no - not cloudy at all. The outlook for the Private Cloud is very bright indeed.
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