Private Cloud Computing
Private cloud computing is the all around king of cloud. If you need to utilize the benefits of full scalability, top of the line security, secure data, cost effectiveness, and all while still being within your provider’s SLA of dedicated environment, then there’s no doubt that you need a private cloud.
Unlike a public cloud, nothing is shared in your environment. It’s your own personal infrastructure. From your own fully customized server architecture, to your storage devices and how they communicate, to your own private network. Nothing besides your own applications are running within your cloud.
This all sounds amazing, but what does it mean to you as a company? Decrease your downtime, if any, and improve your reliability. Don’t spend all day worrying about your environment. Once you see it in action the first time, you’ll know you’re in good hands. Another factor people tend to love is you’re being “green”! By running fewer physical servers, and using less power and energy within the datacenter, you’re helping the environment! However, the key element that most companies love is your drastically reduced IT costs, leaving plenty of room for scaling in the future.
Public VS Private Cloud
Public and private both have their benefits and, to wrap them up, here’s a quick summary.
Public Cloud offerings:
Utility Model – Public clouds are generally on a pay-as-you-go system, meaning you only pay for what you use, and when you’re using it.
No Contracts – Because you pay-as-you-go, this means no contracts. If you only need you’re server on for a day, or even a couple of hours, go for it!
Shared Hardware – Because you’re on a PUBLIC cloud, your hardware, space, storage and other elements are being shared by other customers and users of that provider.
No Control of Hardware Performance – In a public cloud environment, there is no selecting your type of CPU, or other hardware performance benefactors. You are placed on the hardware and network your provider selects.
Self Managed – You manage your server and everything about it.
Private Cloud offerings:
Top-notch security – A private cloud is your own “dedicated” environment. All attributes of your server(s)/cloud can be fully designed to ensure maximum security.
Customizable – Select your own hardware, amount of RAM, networking infrastructure; everything is a fully tailored to fit your needs.
Hybrid CloudIn summary, private clouds are usually a little more expensive and are not on the pay-as-you-go system, but offer so much more for a company. If you just need something quick for your photo site, then public cloud is definitely the route for you. But if you need something secure, and ready for growth as you are, then a private cloud is your selection.
How To Transition Into The Private Cloud
I know, the cloud sounds amazing, but how do you get started? The first crucial approach to getting into the cloud is deciding whether to hose in-house, or within a provider’s datacenter. You must take in consideration everything associated with doing it in-house. Do you have the experienced and skilled staff needed to run and control everything in-house? A service provider cannot only drastically speed up the process of your move, but also ensures it goes perfectly while not affecting anything it shouldn’t. Another benefit with keeping it in a provider’s datacenter is knowing that there is some type of disaster plan in consideration.
After that decision comes deciding on your hardware for your private cloud. This includes all your hardware specs, and their level of performance. Keep in mind, that keeping a consistent CPU speed across your cloud is important. Adding and changing out RAM is easy, but altering and changing CPUs, and having different speeds can be a hassle at times. Along with deciding on your hardware specs, comes deciding on what virtualization platform to use. Some providers will offer multiple platforms, while some only offer what they see as the best fit for most.
After those critical decisions are made, the next step is where the fun starts happening. Use your cloud! With your new box, you can easily deploy and destroy small servers with little to no effort at all, and have your servers backed up so they can automatically re-launch if they crash.
Cloud Computing and SaaS Migration
SaaS has enormous benefits from the old software presentation models. The ease of maintenance, application and appliance updates and patches, recurring revenue for your company, and the lower cost of distribution are what draw in a lot of the companies as well as the end users.
Make migration easy. No more rewriting every single line of code, and attempting to securely transfer it. After that, it’s all about delivery. The ability to deliver the application online 24/7. A complete outage would not affect the end user to run the application, just a small bump on the downloading process. You know that everyone is always online, and running for your users, without fail.
This model ensures a secure system for the end user’s assurance that everything they are doing is 100% safe and secure. Each instance of this application(s) can be launched on its own virtual server even within the cloud environment. Not to mention, all the settings and configuration modules will automatically spin up ready to go.
Cloud Computing Impact on Disaster Recovery
One of the more overlooked areas of private cloud computing is the disaster recovery situations. This all means faster recovery times for your applications, and once again, lowering your costs.
Generally speaking, you have 4 options for your disaster recovery that are opened up within your private cloud…
1. Offsite Backup – The easiest and quickest way to be 100% positive that your data is safe, is to back it up to an offsite datacenter. Say a disastrous earthquake takes place and destroys the entire main datacenter. Since your data is backed up to an offsite location, it’s easily re-launched extremely quickly.
2. Dedicated Warm Site Disaster Recovery – This involves taking hardware servers and locating them at an offsite datacenter. If worse comes to worst, the backed up virtual servers can be revived to the hosted platforms. One unique thing is that the hardware does not need to be identical from the original hardware. The offsite location can be scaled down.
Shared Warm Site Disaster Recovery – In this situation, the original cloud provider places recovery hardware at another datacenter and essentially “shares” the hardware with other users on a “first come, first serve” moto. Think about it though, most disaster hardware just sits there idle, ready for when needed, so this plan can usually be offered at a much much lower price then the other recovery models.
4. Hot Site SAN-SAN Replication – This case may be a little bit more expensive, but SAN-SAN replication across clouds lowest data latency and the quickest means of recovery. Generally speaking, the back up SAN can be more cost efficient in terms of the performance and space, and the size of physical hardware needed can be also be scaled down.
Closing Benefits of Cloud Computing
We’ve gone over cloud, now lets wrap it up with a summary of the amazing features.
Lower Cost Around The Board – Gain your own resource pool that can be assigned as you see fit. Taking advantage of all your hardware to their fullest extent.
Cap-Ex Free – If you choose a public or private cloud environment, you eliminate the capital expense associated with building the infrastructure of your servers.
Ease of Deployment – Servers can be launched and torn down in the same amount of time, minutes. No more worrying about every single little piece of your entire network infrastructure.
Fully Scalable – Don’t worry about purchasing a new “package” offer just because you need some more power. Easily add some more RAM, CPU’s as you see fit. And then the next day, just as easily take them away if they’re not needed anymore.
Lower Your Maintenance Costs – This also leads into being green! By using less hardware and resources, you need less power to keep you running, thus lower power consumption from the datacenter, thus promoting green activity!
Resiliency and Redundancy – Failover is the buzzword. If something crashes on your hardware or application, have confidence that you’re going to automatically spin up and launch another one. Reducing downtime and the length of your headache.
