Blog Battle: Why mastering the private cloud should be your top priority

Today we are trying something different in the blog.  We are posting two articles with differing points of view.  The article below takes the position that Private Cloud is more important than the Public Cloud and should take precedent.  The other article, located here, takes the opposing viewpoint that the Public Cloud is more important should be given priority.  

We hope you will chime in with your comments and opinions in the comments.

Let the Blog Battle begin!

I hereby proclaim that the private cloud should take precedence in your hearts and minds, winning the favor of your attention and mastery!

Why? You will always have infrastructure. Unless you are a very small company that plans on staying a very small company, the chances that you will continue to have some amount of infrastructure to purchase and manage is extremely high.

Reason 1- Cost: The economics of running certain applications in the public cloud just don’t make sense (yet). Pay-by-the-hour, infinitely scalable, public cloud resources are great for certain types of applications. A huge batch job of analytics processing? Why overbuy when you can rent! A seasonal promotion? Perfect for deploying in the cloud that can support spiky workloads! But your day-to-day, predictable workloads? When you add up the service costs for month after month of cloud service fees and weigh that against the declining cost of most hardware… well sometimes it’s better to own (and get the depreciation benefit) than to rent.

Reason 2 – Human resources: To fully take advantage of cloud scalability, you have to do some rewiring of the application… and sometimes the person who wrote that application is long gone. So until you decommission the application, or decide it’s worth it to pay consultants to dig into the code, that app is staying put.

So if you’re going to have some applications remaining on premise, why not maximize the efficiency of your infrastructure by adopting private cloud practices and technologies? There’s a ton of benefit to gain from virtualizing applications and running them on consolidated infrastructure in a highly automated data center. Here are some examples:

1. You’re going to need to have a clear picture of what applications you have and how they are connected before making changes like migrating servers between locations and consolidating them into virtualized data centers. Application-aware network performance management, like Riverbed Cascade, can rapidly build application dependency maps to give you visibility into multi-tier applications. There are ongoing benefits as well, such as rapid troubleshooting capabilities from having an integrated tool for analyzing enterprise-wide flow data and drilling down into specific packets.
2. You’ll need to actually move those applications to your virtualized data center without disrupting service availability. Global load-balancing capabilities in the Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager can allow you to rewire applications in the background while maintaining service availability.  Your private cloud will also benefit from the automation that Stingray provides in increasing application performance and reliability, and support greater server throughput for further consolidation potential.  As a virtual appliance, you can easily right-size your Stingray deployment, while taking full advantage of your virtualized infrastructure.
3. Finally, you’ll need to make sure users can still access applications running in your private cloud data center… which is probably a greater distance from your end users than local servers and data centers were before. Riverbed’s Steelhead WAN optimization technology minimizes the impact of latency – something that adding bandwidth capacity alone cannot do – so that end-users in branch offices and on mobile laptops can continue to use applications as if they were local.  As an added benefit, Steelhead appliances and mobile software can reduce bandwidth consumption by 65-95%, providing efficiency and savings that can be funneled back into the business.

So, not to rain on the whole public cloud parade, but the big party is happening over in private cloud-land. And you’re invited.

So who's right?  Which do you think is more important to your organization?  Public or private cloud?  Let us know in the comments.

Comments

[DPR]

Interesting - no opposing views to the Private Cloud model...I agree, 80% Private Cloud, 20% public cloud is way to go. The 20% public cloud should be for those workloads that lend themselves, primarily from a bandwidth standpoint, to being in the cloud. Large download sites, video streaming, massive e-commerce front ends (not back-ends), or other heavy-volume, Internet facing front end systems. Back-end systems, and core apps for use in the organization belong in the Private Cloud, simply because of security and bandwidth, as well as accountability, control, and the weakness of trusting an "SLA" for your organizations capabilities. The public cloud is not equal to a power plant/electrical generation ... people are contending that public/private clouds are similar to the evolution of power generation in America since 1900. Power generation is an excellent anti-example, because it demonstrates that some things lend themselves to being centralized, and some do not. IT is complex, and applications are unpredictable due to evolving technology. Power generation has not changed since the 1920's at its core, and it is best made a buy-as-you-go service because of the simplicity and lack of rapid technological change that power generation experiences.

[Dormain Drewitz]

Hi DPR,

Thanks for your comments! I think you touch on something really important, which is that the evaluation of what can move to the public cloud and what should stay in the private cloud needs to happen on an application-by-application basis. That requires a level of understanding of what applications are running in the enterprise, where they are interdependent with other applications, and who is using them, that most organizations just don't have. Gaining that insight and visibility is a critical. On that topic, there are some interesting resources here:

http://www.riverbed.com/decomplexify/

I also think it's worth clarifying that on premise, even if virtualized, does not a private cloud make. There is still a lot of work to be done at many organizations to centralize and automate IT operations, which should yield benefits in the form of cost savings and IT agility. The case I was making in this post was not for the status quo, but for the prioritization of those internal efforts. In reality, I think organizations will have to set their own priorities, in part based on the application-by-application analysis discussed above, which will most likely be a unique hybrid of existing IT, private cloud, and public cloud. The Riverbed offering is to enable whatever that unique mixture of IT delivery happens to be.

http://solutioncenters.cio.com/riverbed_hybrid_cloud/