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The True Cost of a Private CloudRick Parker, IT Director, Fetch Technologies | 9/16/2010 |
I expect cost is one of the biggest reasons a lot of companies have not started building private clouds. The problem, I think, is that most companies assume it's just not a cost-effective use of their resources.
![]() It's true that a private cloud may not always be the cheapest option, but it's definitely the most cost-effective way to build a truly reliable and scalable IT infrastructure. In fact, scalability is the key to a private cloud's value: The more you increase server capacity, the more cost-effective your router, firewall, and other networking systems get, and the more you reduce your server redundancy costs. I won't go into an exhaustive study of the various costs -- and cost savings -- associated with private cloud computing. This is an area with a lot of established research, and a quick trip to a source like VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW) will serve up some good case studies dealing with cost and ROI. Instead, I want to focus on a few issues that often get overlooked or downplayed when companies think about the costs and benefits of building a private cloud. Hardware and software costs. A typical company already has most of the hardware components it needs to start building and running a private cloud. That's because there's really no such thing as "cloud hardware," although there are options (such as enterprise-class, chassis-based systems) that are more cost-effective and probably necessary for a production cloud for scalability reasons. For the most part, however, a private cloud is defined by the software and configuration choices your company makes, not by the hardware. At Fetch Technologies, our own private cloud solution is based on VMWare's vSphere Essentials kit and the Platform Computing ISF private cloud management software -- both of which probably cost much less to license than you think. We also use high-density appliances such as Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR) SSG integrated systems that combine router, firewall, and VPN functionality into a single appliance, allowing us to make very cost-effective use of limited data center space. Infrastructure costs. This is worth discussing because it represents such a huge waste of resources. I once worked at a company that spent more than $500,000 just to provision the cooling and power systems for a server room -- and that didn't even include the cost of the servers. And it was still exposed to power outages because the building it was housed in wasn't capable of supporting a diesel backup generator. That server room was practically useless -- and a private cloud architecture makes these kinds of planning and infrastructure disasters easy to avoid. Staffing and IT productivity. Here at Fetch Technologies, we have one cloud administrator supporting 250 virtual servers. Compare this to my previous company, where six people managed 500 physical servers. And with end-user provisioning and management, we're still cutting days or weeks off service requests. Scaling and redundancy. How big do you want a data center to be? I think there's a simple answer to this question: How many servers do you feel comfortable losing at any one time? Smaller, faster, cheaper data center designs -- the hallmark of a private cloud architecture -- make it possible to build more scalable, redundant IT infrastructures. Most companies that take the opposite approach, concentrating growth in a single data center, never achieve true redundancy -- it simply becomes too expensive to duplicate. Your own organization's mileage will vary, of course, in terms of what a cloud computing solution costs you to build and operate. Cloud computing isn't necessarily cheap, but it is more cost-effective in the long run than a traditional IT infrastructure. And if you're focused on the big picture, that's what really matters. The blogs and comments posted on EnterpriseEfficiency.com do not reflect the views of TechWeb, EnterpriseEfficiency.com, or its sponsors. EnterpriseEfficiency.com, TechWeb, and its sponsors do not assume responsibility for any comments, claims, or opinions made by authors and bloggers. They are no substitute for your own research and should not be relied upon for trading or any other purpose. |
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More Blogs from Rick Parker
Rick Parker 11/29/2011
![]() The current IT architecture process is to order the number of racks needed to support initial requirements, order some additional empty racks with a Right of First Refusal, and add a ...
Rick Parker 8/5/2011
![]() Cloud computing, especially private/hybrid cloud computing, consists of shared hardware, so monitoring becomes much more critical. If a performance or capacity limit is reached, multiple ...
Rick Parker 12/16/2010
![]() Private cloud management is different from current network management. In a private cloud, end user business staff is responsible for managing their own IT resources, and IT is responsible ...
Rick Parker 12/9/2010
![]() I have been reading and hearing a lot of bad information and incorrect opinions over the past few months by experienced IT staff and self-proclaimed cloud computing experts: people ...
Rick Parker 10/26/2010
![]() If I ever buy any more server-based storage (and I don't plan to), it will be in very small increments. It's expensive, unreliable, and inefficient. And with private clouds on the horizon, ...
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