The Road to Private Cloud Doesn’t Need to Be Bumpy!

Industry analyst Bill Claybrook wrote a lengthy article that recently appeared discussing the “bumpy ride” many companies may face on the road to private cloud implementation. Ironically, the article coincided with the release of Platform’s ISF Starter Pack, which is actually designed specifically to make that road less bumpy!

The good news, according to Claybrook, is that private clouds are the focus of many IT managers these days, as evidenced by Gartner, which reports 75 percent of IT managers would both pursue and invest more in private clouds than in public clouds through 2012.

Claybrook cited a number of challenges that private clouds can pose for companies, which include:

• Budget – According to Claybrook, private clouds can be expensive.
• Public Cloud Integration – Claybrook says companies should build private clouds that can be easily moved to a hybrid public model if necessary.
  Scale – Private clouds often don’t have the same capacity to scale as public ones, says Claybrook.
• Reconfiguration – Claybrook claims many organizations will need to tear down their infrastructure on the road to private cloud.
• Legacy hardware – Similarly, Claybrook recommends not repurposing old servers that require manual configuration for private clouds.
• Technology obsolescence – Claybrook advises that once implemented, private cloud stacks be kept up-to-date with the latest upgrades.
• Fear of change – Finally, IT teams will need to learn new ways of doing things, Claybrook says. This should be turned into a growth opportunity for your IT staff.

At Platform, we’re fond of saying that private clouds are indeed “built not bought.” But we have to respectfully disagree with Claybrook that the road will be bumpy for most. That’s part of why you go through the “build” process in the first place. Private clouds are not necessarily meant to be an immediate replacement for all IT operations within an organization. Taking an iterative approach to private cloud and “building” it out from department to department as necessary is the best way to implement a private cloud—and not all IT operations may need to be part of the cloud, either.

Making private cloud implementation easier and at low cost and low risk is exactly why we came up with the Platform ISF Starter Pack. For $4995, the ISF Starter Pack allows companies to quickly and easily set up a private cloud while avoiding many of Claybrook’s stated pitfalls:

• Budget – At $4995, the ISF Starter Pack is an affordable option. Many private cloud options in the market can cost upwards of $50K.
• Public Cloud Integration – The Starter Pack includes the same functionality as Platform ISF, including the ability extend the initial deployment to public clouds like Amazon EC2.
• Scale – Platform’s history in workload and resource management guarantees a high-scaling private cloud solution.
• Reconfiguration – Platform works with what you have in place because it’s implemented as a management layer – there’s no need to rip and replace your entire infrastructure. Most organizations can’t afford this anyway.
• Legacy hardware – Lather, rinse, repeat the “Reconfiguration” entry...
• Technology obsolescence - with Platform ISF you get a single private cloud management focused product that is the core of your private cloud architecture. This will enable you to evolve your cloud at your pace (not another technology suppliers pace) and ensure you retain control and have a partner that will protect you from technology obsolescence.
• Fear of change – The Starter Pack allows organizations that want to try private clouds to test them at minimal risk without a huge upfront investment. You can ease into the cloud on your own terms.

If you want to test private cloud without changing your entire infrastructure from the get-go try the ISF Starter Pack—it can help make the road to private cloud less bumpy.