What is the Private Cloud?
One of my most read blog posts is Private Cloud? which means that the private cloud is of interest and hopefully what I wrote went over fairly well. However greater minds than mine actually design all of this and one of those minds is Zane Adam who is pretty much in charge of Windows Azure. My good friend Planky (the Azure evangelist on our team) and I managed to get him on video to share his vision of the public and private cloud..
Hopefully this all makes sense, so how to go about having your own private cloud? As usual with Microsoft , you have a choice, in this case 3 choices, all detailed on Microsoft’s private cloud portal:
- Get a service provider to do it for you.
- Go for an almost off the shelf with reference hardware configured for use as a private cloud from anyone of the six top hardware vendors. This is the recently launched Hyper-V Cloud offering, the good thing about this is that you can use your existing trusted hardware vendor and it’s all based on commodity hardware.
- Alternatively you can build your own and in that case I would still point you to the private cloud resources, but I would also recommend you have a look at Alan le Marquand’s (another UK based evangelist) blog series on how to build your own private cloud:
Option 1 is the closest you can get to a public cloud as the service provider can provide elasticity and scalability by evening out demand across multiple customers. The other two can only emulate this if you are working in a large enough organisation that individual departments combined needs are largely flat across time, and you can then use automation and monitoring to shuffle capacity around to give each department the service it needs when it needs it.
No doubt this will evolve again over the coming months as one of the benefits of the cloud is its agility, but the problem for me is keeping my posts up to date!