Cloud Use Case Series, Part 1: Infrastructure Cloud

In my many conversations with Platform ISF customers, I’ve noticed that early adopters of private cloud technologies tend to fall into four types of use case categories:

1. Infrastructure Cloud
2. Application Cloud
3. Test/Dev Cloud
4. HPC Cloud

It’s worth mentioning now that although application clouds actually provide the most comprehensive benefits of all the four types of use cases, some early adopters have chosen to start with smaller-scope initiatives in order to acclimate their IT, business processes and application architectures to the new model of shared computing that private cloud provides. However, the long-term objectives of most of these organizations is to evolve to application cloud to get the most value from cloud computing.

In an effort to educate our customers and readers on the benefits of private cloud, I plan on posting a four-part blog series that outlines each of these four private cloud use cases for companies evaluating internal shared infrastructures.

First up is the infrastructure cloud. This approach involves a ready-to-use infrastructure that enables deployment of application environments or simple virtual machine (VM) images based on application requirements, and business units are charged for what they use. This results in rapid infrastructure deployment and modification, reduced capital and operational expenses, higher utilization and better cost controls for users.

One of our early adopters of infrastructure cloud is Fetch Technologies, a SaaS software company that enables organizations to extract, aggregate and use real-time information from websites. With over 200 virtual servers in production and test/dev using VMware, Fetch had to provision resources manually to increase SaaS capacity. Furthermore, it was taking several hours/days to change configurations on behalf of their customers.

With Platform ISF, Fetch provisions groups of servers at a time automatically, thereby dramatically reducing labor costs. Rick Parker, IT Manager at Fetch, recently told me that “if we had continued to do manual provisioning we would not be able to scale fast enough to keep up with customer demand with our current staff. Platform ISF lets us scale up without adding staff saving us cost, and helping us to better meet customer expectations.”

Thanks to the multi-hypervisor support in Platform ISF, Rich and his team only need to learn how to use one interface, which significantly reduces administrator training. Platform ISF’s self-service user portal allows Rich to simplify server management tasks so that users can make the changes they need at any time. And Platform ISF will allow the company to leverage public cloud resources to supplement the resources available in their private cloud.

Stay tuned for part 2 in my cloud use case series – application cloud - next week!