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 Public Cloud is more important than the Private Cloud and should take precedent. The other article, located here, takes the opposing viewpoint that the Private 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!
Why public cloud is the future of IT
Why not? Streamline your infrastructure. Unless you want to manage an ever-growing pile of applications, servers, and storage, the chances are public cloud offers you a better way. Hoarding stuff under your roof is so yesterday.
Reason 1 - Cost: The traditional “own” vs. “rent” argument always comes up, but it largely misses the concept of innovation. The downward spiral is of cyclical binge purchases, struggles to digest all that hardware, and the eventual purge. Huge capital budgets are wasted on over-priced kit that you’ll outgrow in a couple years anyway. Take your backup storage as an example: how many different tape formats have you bought en masse? 4mm, optical disk, 8mm, DLTI, DLTIII, DLT IV, LTO 3, 4, 5…. Every time a new format came out, you probably blew a ton of cash on new hardware and media. Don’t even get me started on hallways full of self-proclaimed “redundant” disks. You’ve been left holding bags full of outdated and possibly unreadable data. Far more efficient to use operating budgets for cloud services that empower you to provision only what you actually need, on demand when you actually need it.
Reason 2 - Human resources: Meanwhile your staff spends their time on low-value activities like unboxing and racking and wiring and patching and repairing and replacing. Continuing with the tape storage example, how many man-hours have been spent over the last few decades inventorying and duplicating (again!) and ejecting and off-siting and requesting and waiting for the tape before you can start a restore job? Is that really how you want your information technology professionals spending their days? The same class of problem carries into other IT disciplines like apps and servers.
So if you’re going to join us in the 21st century, why not maximize the efficiency of your infrastructure by adopting public cloud services? There’s a ton of benefit to gain from virtualizing applications and running them on consolidated infrastructure in a highly automated data center. Just let someone else spend the capital and manpower to run that cloud data center for you!
- First, 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 into the public cloud. Application-aware network performance management, like Riverbed Cascade, can rapidly build application dependency maps to give you visibility to benchmark performance for multi-tier applications.
- Next, you’ll need to actually move those applications to your cloud provider’s environment, 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 public cloud service will also benefit from the automation that Stingray provides in increasing application performance and reliability, and support greater server throughput for more efficient usage. As a cloud appliance, you can easily right-size your Stingray deployment, while taking full advantage of your new infinitely scalable infrastructure.
- Not least, you can bin the tapes entirely, by backing up to the cloud storage provider of your choice. Whitewater offers drop-in integration with you current backup software, but encrypts and deduplicates the backup data before storing it safely in the cloud. You can restore locally for common incidents or from the cloud in a “smoking crater” type disaster. Win, win.
- 
Finally, you’ll need to make sure users can still access applications running in the public cloud… 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 anywhere can continue to use applications as if they were local. As an added benefit, Cloud Steelhead and Steelhead Mobile software can reduce bandwidth consumption by 65-95%, providing efficiency and savings that can be funneled back into the business.
While most hardware pushers slap on a “private cloud” label to keep you over-buying boxes for your data center, the real efficiency and innovation is coming from the public cloud. We’ll help you get there!
So who's right? Which do you think is more important to your organization? Public or private cloud? Let us know in the comments.
