1 of the greatest IT buzz words of the past couple of years, ‘cloud computing’ has brought amazing promise to the world of data technology. Cloud computing interest has lead to widespread curiosity and awareness of public cloud services. Pooled computing resources, divided and allocated to various users, have been proven in the development and testing realm of IT to have tremendous positive aspects. Those advantages nonetheless have been overshadowed by concerns of a lack of security and uptime assurances amongst Enterprise IT executives
The private cloud aims to lessen, if not eliminate, those concerns by dedicating exclusive hardware to every user. Instead of your data becoming stored off “in the cloud” somewhere, one can point to a group of servers in a data center and say, “that is your information, and only your data, on those servers,” alleviating security concerns. It is a “very best of both worlds” answer that can bring important benefits like improved uptime and reliability at a lower cost than on traditional IT infrastructure.
In reality, according to Yankee Group’s recent survey on Cloud Computing, private cloud computing is preferred two:1 over totally managed public cloud solutions. 67% of respondents preferred the private cloud, whereas only 28% preferred a fully managed public cloud, 21% preferred an unmanaged public cloud, and 8% had been looking to a hybrid cloud solution.
That is why we compiled the best five reasons why your business should rethink your IT infrastructure and look into the advantages of private cloud computing.
Much like a dedicated or colocated server, the security of your private cloud depends on a variety of aspects. However, if you have the correct physical security, anti-virus software program, and firewall rules in place, you can rest assured your information as secure as if it were sitting appropriate next to your desk. With a private cloud, you know where your servers are located and that the proper physical and network security is in location. You can meet and talk to those in charge of supplying support for your hardware and come check out it if you like.
This is one of the most alluring benefits of cloud computing. The ability to spin up and tear down a server in a matter of minutes is incredibly powerful and helpful. No longer is there any wasted effort in trying to size a server beforehand when you can develop a server on the fly. Want a lot more disk space? A lot more RAM? Far more CPU? No difficulty. With private cloud computing, you can reallocate resources in moments with out worrying about obtaining a physical server that will have the resources your new server needs.
Virtualization drastically increases the value of your physical server hardware. Instead of having 5 servers that average 10% CPU utilization, you can virtualize the 5 servers on 1 physical server, sharing the resources. This decreases rack space, power usage, and is simpler to manage. This also makes it possible for you to create copies of your servers and have them up and running quite swiftly, now that they have been virtualized. If you have the proper resource management tools installed on your server, you can automatically allocate the appropriate resources to a server when it wants it or turn off unused servers during low usage an extraordinarily potent and efficient way to manage your servers.
When you connect a SAN to your private cloud, extraordinary redundancy can be achieved. Not only can you load balance between servers, automatically shifting server resources between servers on the fly, but in an N+1 environment (having at least 1 additional server than absolutely required), you can shut down one server without causing downtime. Imagine performing maintenance on your server like adding much more RAM, replacing a tough drive, or upgrading software, with out experiencing any downtime. When configured correctly you could power off one server and it would automatically shift the virtual servers over to an available server in your cloud. Taking your disaster protection up one level, you could have yet another SAN in yet another data center and perform SAN to SAN replication for a hot internet site DR environment capable of full recovery in much less than an hour.
The best part about a private cloud is that not only do you get all of the wonderful positive aspects of virtualization and security, but it can be less expensive and much less of a hassle then hosting your own servers or buying dedicated servers. If your organization has far more than two servers, it could benefit from virtualization. If your company has much more than 10 servers, it could benefit from private cloud computing with a dedicated SAN and multiple physical host servers. The public cloud revolutionized Data Technologies forever the private cloud brings the rewards to the masses.
The private cloud hosting is still a comparatively new idea, but is based on some technology that has been about for a while and has proven itself for years. Besides supplying some tremendous advantages of pooled computing resources and virtualization, it maintains the security and reliability of a normal dedicated server. The private cloud is not for everyone but a managed data center operator can make the transition to private cloud computing an reasonably priced method and enable you to fully expertise all of the fantastic rewards of the private cloud.
