Vladimir Covic

What is a Private Cloud? The Story of Scalability and Efficiency Do you remember the time when you had to be very careful and picky about what you put on your hard drive? You were limited by a specific HDD size, and whether you had a hard disk of 20 GB or 250 GB, eventually, you’d reach that limit and then you would have to uninstall or delete something to make space for new things. Fortunately, with the advent of cloud computing and cloud storage, those days are now behind us. Today, scalability and efficiency of the cloud allow us (or rather the system) to deal with the increased workload and data storage demands in a cost-effective way. What is Cloud Computing? Simply put, cloud computing allows us to store data and programs somewhere on the Internet and then easily access them, just as if it were on our computer. The cloud allows the users to use Internet resources like any other utility and not having to build or maintain a whole new in-house infrastructure. Cloud storage can be: Private Public Hybrid Here, we will talk about private cloud, but know that other two types (public and hybrid) are also very much important. Private Cloud and its Main Models Private cloud is built and used by a single enterprise entity. This way, a company that stores its data in private cloud can host what it wants on the Internet, but doesn’t have to worry about data security as is often the case with public cloud. Usually, private cloud is hosted within the company’s own firewall and only its employees can access what’s on it. This is “on-premise private cloud”. This type of cloud is typically hosted on the organization’s data center and while it is suitable for data requiring full control and configurability, its size limitation often turn the user’s attention to the other private cloud model – external hosting. Externally-hosted private cloud is a model where data is stored by a cloud service provider, such as OpenStack or Oracle. Here, the hosted cloud service provider is responsible for delivering an exclusive cloud environment. This type of private cloud is mainly used by companies and organizations that need to store big data, but are worried about to the risks involved with sharing physical resources. Scalability and Efficiency in the Private Cloud Model The concepts of scalability and efficiency and how they pertain to the cloud have been discussed since the beginnings of the cloud. To understand them, we would have to delve a bit into the systems that have existed before cloud storage was a thing, such as Web servers. Even though scalability does have its limit, it allows applications in the cloud to handle larger inputs and big data and solve them either by finding new models or by using the resources they have at their disposal. In other words, scalability is the ability of dynamic resource allocation, but can be more. As for efficiency, it is not an actual cloud computing concept but works very well when we talk about it and the level of satisfaction the user has when using cloud storage. This includes not only the price charged by the hosted cloud service provider for its solutions, but also the execution time and how comfortable users are when using the cloud. What Private Cloud Service Providers Are Out There? A few vendors have managed to surface from the crowd and grab a bigger portion of the cake. The most successful when it comes to private cloud are: IBM With an army of in-house IT experts and a legacy that comes with the name “International Business Machines Corporation”, IBM is able to position its private cloud solution SmartCloud Foundation as one of the major players in the field. Amazon Amazon focuses more on the public cloud, but that doesn’t mean it has neglected the private model through its Amazon Private Cloud. HP Hewlett-Packard is another well-known name that has joined the cloud. Right now, its CloudSystem Enterprise Systems is at the front of HP’s new focus on cloud, Big Data and mobile. Rackspace Rackspace is a relatively new company, but even without the vast resources that some bigger companies have, this company is growing rather well as a hosted cloud service provider. Things are looking good right now for Rackspace, especially after it entered a strategic partnership with VMware, which is another important name in the private cloud club. Microsoft MS is a late-comer to the cloud arena, but it is catching up fast. This has allowed it to avoid some of the mistakes other cloud vendors made and to quickly position its own private cloud solution as one of the top on the current market. Clearly, both scalability and efficiency are important concepts when we talk about cloud (private, hybrid or public) or cloud storage. Through them can best be seen the ability of the cloud service provider and its solution to perform the tasks that their customers expect of them.