The Building Blocks of Private Clouds

Private clouds enable the power of sharing by maximizing the efficiency of computing, networking and storage resources. So, organizations can achieve rapid and efficient delivery of IT services, faster time to market, and reduced IT capital and operating expenditures with private clouds. Private clouds enable organizations to maximize the existing infrastructure investments and take advantage of cloud benefits without compromising the security and internal policies. The private clouds can make internal enterprise data centers act like public cloud providers. It can significantly improve the VMs to admin ratios up to 1000:1. Large enterprises are prioritising private clouds, according to a survey by Forrester Research. Forrester principal analyst James Staten said “Larger companies sink more investment into their own data centres, operations personnel, and IT processes. Thus, they have more to lose if the business goes to the public clouds. These organisations also have more in-house capabilities with which to build and operate a private cloud.” Let us examine the key building blocks of private clouds.

Virtualization: Virtualization provides significant cost savings by server consolidation but also provides far reaching benefits by enabling workload portability, encapsulation, and automated administration. Virtualization is a key building block to a complete cloud implementation, enabling flexibility, isolation and mobility within a cloud environment. Organizations which have deployed virtualization are already receiving some of the benefits that a complete private cloud solution will provide. The virtualization provides the capability of decoupling workloads from the servers they run on. System administrators can quickly move applications and services from one physical computer to other based on changing resource needs. New applications inside the virtual machines can be deployed with-in matter of minutes thus decreasing the IT response time.

Automation: Any company that has reached virtualization maturity needs automation of the virtual environment to gain any operational efficiency. Automation is crucial for enabling rapid provisioning and deployment. By automating tedious and time-consuming tasks such as configuration, setups, capacity modeling & real-time monitoring, organizations can focus more on strategic initiatives. Organizations can drastically reduce overall provisioning times and recurring provisioning efforts with automated self-service capabilities of private clouds. It must contain policy engine, work flow engine, provisioning engine to enable policy driven automated provisioning. The automated decision making and automated provisioning align IT resources to business goals through intelligent, policy-based IT resource allocation. The automated provisioning improves productivity of IT staff by automating and orchestrating manual repetitive tasks to decrease human errors during installation and configuration processes. IT can respond to business needs in real time by streamlining the organization’s entrenched silos and automating end to end service delivery processes.

Self-service management: Many analysts estimate that over 70% of outages in a data center are caused by mis-configuration while provisioning servers. The automation of server provisioning & configuration will make it easy to reproduce or repurpose servers, an otherwise very time consuming process. The self service capabilities using self-service portal, service catalogs and automated application provisioning reduces administrative burden and infrastructure management costs for IT. The users can provision and deploy applications and services in a matter of minutes with self-service capabilities. The users can rapidly build or tear down the complex environments using self-service provisioning capabilities. A complete end-to-end service delivery management that covers service creation, publishing, governance and management is required to enable a true self-service management. The service delivery orchestration and automation engine connects IT processes and coordinates siloed teams with pre-defined service delivery workflows. It also standardizes how IT services are delivered across organization and orchestrates IT processes that span across multiple groups.

Measured service: Private clouds must automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability. To be charged only for what you use, your usage must be measured. Service resource usage must be monitored, controlled, and reported to provide the transparency for both the provider and consumer. The capacity and cost management components are key to measure cloud services. The chargeback component must provide cost management, monitoring and reporting capabilities. The capacity management component must provide resource utilization, monitoring and reporting capabilities. The capacity and chargeback components enable business units to account, monitor and report resource usage and associated costs. Business units get the visibility about how much they are paying for resources and how much goes for unused, allowing them to optimize resource consumption. It enables to make better informed decisions by business units with a clear view into resources consumed and their associated costs. Giving organizations in-depth information about capacity and cost drivers help them make smarter decisions during budgeting processes, cost reduction analysis, and capacity forecasting analysis. Business and IT leaders can also use the data to make better projections about future resource needs.