People often ask what the difference is between virtualization and private clouds. Private clouds allow us to add capacity into our existing environment in an intelligent manner.
A major sports organization, for example, experienced huge surges in ecommerce activity as it approached game days and needed to augment their physical environment to meet this demand. Instead of buying additional physical severs that will sit idle for most of the year, they use a private cloud to scale up in a way that aligned with the organization’s security and compliance needs.
Tackling new complexities
Virtualization alone only got the organization so far. It enabled them to handle spikes in user traffic, but it didn’t address the security and flexibility challenges inherent to a virtual environment. Merely creating virtual environments without added controls would have brought about concerns about the stability of the IT infrastructure.
Security and stability challenges
To mitigate risk, the organization needed to know who created each virtual machine, where it had been, how it had been used and who had accessed it. In addition, virtualization introduced new complexities. For example, if a virtual machine isn’t running all the time, it most likely doesn’t have the latest patches. Thus, when the organization brought up a virtual machine, they ran the risk of introducing viruses and other security problems into the environment.
To solve these challenges, the organization followed these steps—bringing needed structure to their virtual environment.
- Plan. Performed an inventory of virtual and physical machines.
- Prepare. Conducted “what if” scenarios to determine how shifting workloads from physical to virtual to public or private clouds would impact the business and whether moving some resources to the cloud would save money.
- Package. Prepared workloads to allow them to be portable across their infrastructure. By embedding intelligence into each workload, the organization ensured that as they move through the enterprise, they did not breach security or compliance rules.
- Present. Created an interface from which business users could see and request business services delivered by IT.
- Price. Identified the value of what they were delivering so users would understand the real costs of IT services.
Following these steps brought structure to the organization’s virtual environment. That’s what private cloud is all about: The ability to quickly deliver capabilities in an intelligent and secure manner.
Posted
Aug 26 2010, 10:20 AM
by
RichardWhitehead