Private Cloud

Private cloud provides hosted services to a limited number of people behind a firewall. Advances in virtualization and distributed computing have allowed corporate network and datacenter administrators to effectively become service providers that meet the needs of their "customers" within the corporation."Customers will see that we can now better support an environment that’s up and running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. With System Center, we can scale … up and down faster and get more projects into the cloud."

What Is a Private Cloud?

Private cloud and internal cloud products claim to "deliver some benefits of cloud computing without the pitfalls", capitalizing on Data Security Policies, corporate governance, and reliability concerns. Private cloud is the implementation of cloud services on resources that are dedicated to your organization, whether they exist on-premises or off-premises. With a private cloud, you get many of the benefits of public cloud computing including self-service, scalability, and elasticity with the additional control and customization available from dedicated resources.

There are two models for cloud services that can be delivered in a private cloud: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). With IaaS, you can use infrastructure resources (compute, network, and storage) as a service, while PaaS provides a complete application platform as a service. Microsoft offers solutions that deliver IaaS and PaaS for both private and public cloud deployments.

Private Cloud Overview and Advantages

The main thing that sets a private cloud apart from a commercially-used public cloud is where the hardware is kept and how it’s maintained. A private cloud is typically hosted on the company’s own virtual servers, within their own network infrastructure.

The main advantage one has with a privately-managed cloud is direct control over every aspect of the cloud’s implementation: the hardware, the networking, the operating system and other software used to create the cloud itself; the way cloud security is implemented; even the APIs used (that is, if you’re using an open source system).

Another advantage of a private cloud is that it can generally be built from reasonably current commodity hardware. The most stringent requirements, apart from disk space and memory, are processors that support virtualization.

A third advantage is locality. A cloud hosted in your own datacenter, or on your own property, is far easier to move data into (and out of) than a cloud hosting elsewhere.

A fourth advantage iscloud security. If you are hosting your own cloud infrastructure on a private LAN, with no connections to the outside world, it’s theoretically a good deal easier to secure. Since it’s your network and your boxes, you can exercise that much more discretion over it.

Private Cloud Disadvantages

One major disadvantage of a private cloudis the work involved in creating and maintaining the cloud. The whole point of using someone else’s cloud infrastructure is to save you the trouble of having to build it. It becomes all the more difficult if you want to securely access the cloud from outside your corporate LAN

It’s doubly hard if you have no experience setting up such things, and need to figure it out as you go.

Virtual private cloud

A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is a private cloud existing within a shared or public cloud. It is a portion of a public cloud infrastructure that has been set aside for use by an organization, and is only accessible via an IPsec virtual private network connection.

Amazon Web Services launched Amazon Virtual Private Cloud which allows the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud service to be connected to legacy infrastructure over an IPSec virtual connection. Google supports similar functionality via their Secure Data Connector.

Private Cloud Technology Examples

Eucalyptus

A major vendor of technology for creating private clouds is Eucalyptus. Eucalyptus interfaces directly with Amazon EC2, and in fact uses the same interface as EC2. Advantage of Eucalyptus is how the interface module can be swapped with something else. But for now, EC2 is the default choice due to its wide adoption.

Elestra

Another private-cloud company is Elestra, whose Enterprise Cloud Server was designed to make it easier to package and deploy application stacks into the cloud. Elestra provides packaging support for Oracle’s database and Web Logic app servers, among many others.

VMware

Own private-cloud architecture is built on top of VMware vSphere, and they also offer an “infrastructure-as-a-service” version via vCloud Express.

Microsoft

Microsoft came late to virtualization and have likewise come late to cloud computing, but are preparing their own private cloud offerings (“Azure”) for later this year. As you might expect, it’ll be built on top of Windows Server / Hyper-V, and will be managed with the forthcoming Dynamic Infrastructure Toolkit for System Center.