ICT Telecoms and Software Expert Advice

Advising on the commercial impact of technology and
market changes in telecoms, software and IT services

Home > Media > Telecoms and Software News

TELECOMS AND SOFTWARE NEWS

Are private clouds pies in the sky?

Madan Sheina

Are private clouds pies in the sky?

Cloud computing is starting to take shape in interesting ways. Start-up Elastra recently closed a $12 million second round of funding to accelerate development of a VMware version of its cloud server technology that can be deployed within a company's firewall. But doesn't that run against the original premise of public cloud computing, and can companies really emulate some of its key features in-house?

Private clouds brewing on the horizon

The term 'cloud computing' is morphing, in the same way that on-demand and software as a service did before it. Some will argue that this dilutes the purity of the deal, while others will be more laissez faire. However, the evolution of the cloud concept will definitely happen.

Public cloud infrastructures from Amazon and Google are now starting to become more widely understood by enterprise IT departments looking to lower the cost of buying, building and managing infrastructure. Now the term 'private cloud' is starting to take root in their cloud computing discussions.

A private cloud sitting behind a corporate firewall attempts to retrofit the benefits of public cloud infrastructure with the control of private data centres. Private clouds certainly share a public cloud's focus on being distributed - across geographies and across components within the platform. They also share a focus on providing linear scalability - by adding additional components and using standard hardware that is sometimes virtualised into a grid.

Cloud computing purists will invariably argue that private clouds are an oxymoron, with their hybrid approach conflicting with the core tenets of cloud computing - i.e. that of removing the burden of buying, building and managing the underlying application infrastructure. Of course the obvious drawback of a private cloud is that because you own it you have to buy much of the capability upfront, maintain it and upgrade it in the future.

On the other hand, the private approach does address some of the concerns that IT departments have over public clouds, like security, reliability and corporate governance - the recent outage at Amazon's S3 service in July (it was down for eight hours) being a case in point. Private clouds can also be customised more easily for specific needs - again, since you own the cloud you can modify it more easily to suit your needs. Public clouds are more generic in architecture because they are designed around a common denominator approach for satisfying the needs of a broad range of business applications. Finally, a private cloud might well prove to be a more cost-effective architecture over time, in terms of storage at least, even though the upfront cost will always be more expensive.

Expect to see first-generation public cloud initiatives tangent into private cloud architectures for specific applications that are deemed mission-critical or manage ultra-sensitive data. Cost might also play a part as companies take stock of the expense associated with having a service outsourced. They may decide to bring that capability in-house, yet keep hold of some of the components of the public cloud architecture that worked well - similar to the way that intranets have been created from the concept of the Internet. But this migration won't happen tomorrow. Private clouds are still very much on the horizon.

Elastra is gaining visibility earlier than others, but the Amazon relationship will be tricky to manage

Elastra, an existing cloud provider, is gaining market attention with its move towards private clouds. That interest is reflected in the recent funding that Elastra received last month from, among others, Amazon. Elastra's existing cloud computing application management technology consists of a practical brace of markup languages (ECML and EDML) that help to define cloud infrastructure for supporting applications.

Elastra and other cloud computing proponents like Enomalism, 3tera and Cassatt are all pushing the idea of private clouds. Elastra might be hogging the limelight right now because of its Amazon funding, but that could end up being a sticking point if it aspires to gain broad acceptance as a platform-neutral broker for cloud computing. It's hard to see any of Amazon's cloud computing rivals getting to close to the company, but if Elastra narrows its focus to become the standard for managing private clouds - built within corporate data centres or at hosting centres operated by the likes of HP, IBM or AT&T - then it has a much better chance of success.

About:

This article is an extract taken from Ovum's Straight Talk service. This daily email bulletin provides our expert's views and opinions on important news and events in global IT and telecoms. If you have a comment or question regarding this article then please submit your details here:

Email address:

Suggestion:

If you would like to find out more about Straight Talk please contact StraightTalk@ovum.com

If you would like to find out more about Ovum services then please click here for details

Search

Contact Us

Expertise

© Datamonitor - Ovum is a Datamonitor company