Don’t have a private cloud yet?

anoop wrote this on 26 Mar 2012

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No? Well, its time you setup one! For one thing, the hype is over now and companies are starting to realize the real benefits (and downsides) of a private cloud. Because the term “private cloud” (and even “cloud” for that matter) is heavily over-loaded and conveniently interpreted, let me clarify what I mean here. A “private cloud” is a cloud solution that is running on infrastructure that is fully owned or fully reserved for the use of one company alone & usually on-premise. And just as any “cloud” solution, it must be elastic and on-demand.

The first step towards a private cloud is “virtualization”. By today, virtualization has become more or less ubiquitous and everyone runs one or the other hypervisor. In the open source world, Xen and KVM are two of the most popular ones and over at Neev, we have been able to utilize both of these to a great extent. At one time, Neev’s internal server infrastructure consisted of nearly 50 physical machines and a great deal of management & maintenance around them. Today, we have less than 10 physical machines for the same purposes and a good many VMs running in them. The drive to virtualize (nearly) everything came not just out of the projected cost benefits but also from other advantages. Backups are simple, VMs can be quickly resized or moved to different physical boxes if they need additional resources.

This provides the elasticity but to get the infrastructure to be truly on-demand, what is needed is a private cloud solution. This provides a way for end-users to launch a new VM whenever the need arises and to give it up once the job is done, thus freeing up resources for others. This results in optimal hardware utilization. Users don’t need to wait in the queue, server administrators don’t need to do much and the organization doesn’t have unutilized infrastructure overheads. End result: everyone is happy!

Eucalyptus and OpenStack are two very popular open-source platforms for building private clouds. They both run on top of Xen and KVM. Both communities are very active and both are working towards better compatibility with other cloud APIs such as the AWS APIs. This is great since a good many companies will eventually want to run a hybrid solution across public and private clouds. Neev’s tryst with both these platforms has shown that they have now come of age.

So, is a private cloud right for you? Is it truly advantageous for your needs? Get in touch with us and our team of cloud experts will help you map out a cloud strategy that’s right for your organization.

Visit us at Neevtech.com to know more about our offerings.