How to Build a Turnkey Private and Hybrid Cloud
CIOs and data center managers are hesitant to place important data and applications in the public cloud. As a result, turnkey, ready to go, cloud solutions have become very popular. Here are the three essential elements that should constitute any turnkey private and/or hybrid cloud solution.
Wed, September 14, 2011
CIO — The hype around cloud computing is hard to ignore and as each vendor is trying to put the word "cloud" in front of all its products, enterprises are finding it extremely difficult to sift through the noise and really find which products work best specifically for their data center.
While the ability to utilize the public cloud is extremely appealing due to the reduced infrastructure management needed in a public rather than private environment, CIOs and data center managers are hesitant to place important data and applications in the public cloud. With this cautious viewpoint, enterprises are turning to private and/or hybrid cloud solutions that will enable them to receive the benefits of a public cloud while keeping their infrastructure under their control and experience improved agility and infrastructure utilization—leading to dramatic cost and time savings.
Therefore, the popularity in turnkey, ready to go, cloud solutions has skyrocketed over the past year as enterprises are on an active search for the simplest and quickest way to get their private cloud infrastructure up and running. A turnkey cloud promises some appealing benefits like simplicity, quick roll-out, and cost savings, but many organizations are still perplexed by how to evaluate a turnkey solution—or even what capabilities one should include—and how to integrate it with their existing network, compute and storage infrastructure.
To help enterprises evaluate here are the three essential elements that should constitute any turnkey private and/or hybrid cloud solution:
1. Intelligent and reliable automation features:
A turnkey cloud solution must be able to automatically provision configurations when needed and decommission devices when not needed. Additionally, it should be able to combine all known devices, discover new devices and compile them into a resource pool. With the introduction of hybrid cloud computing the importance for intelligent automation features significantly increases. Enterprises need to be able to reliably and securely burst into a public cloud when resources are not available in the private cloud.One of the most important elements of ensuring the selection of the correct turnkey solution for an environment is selecting a solution that not only provisions virtualized resources but physical and public cloud resources as well. Today, when organizations think of cloud solutions they seem to jump right to technology that only handles virtualization. However, this is only a partial solution as enterprises on average have only 50 percent of their applications virtualized. Therefore, when building a private cloud using a tool that provisions hardware is a necessity to gain the full benefits of a private cloud. The ability to provision and decommission entire hardware and virtualized topologies that include compute, network and storage is a crucial element of a turnkey solution. This feature is crucial to controlling resource sprawl and maximizing the utilization of existing resources.
