Some people like to start the New Year with predictions. I like to clean house, simplify, and make room for the new.
So I’ve summarized my 2011 private and hybrid IaaS cloud thinking from conversations, blogs, white papers, meetups, conferences and tradeshows — on a single 3”x5” card.
Private/hybrid cloud value proposition – it’s a “better mousetrap”
· Faster – Less IT friction with developers, accelerated time to business results
· Better – Deliver IT as a service, tailored to user needs, higher service levels
· Cheaper – more efficient use of people (standardization and automation)
and computing (utilization) resources
If not faster, better, and cheaper – why do it?
Private/hybrid cloud economics
1) Minimize cost of the solution
2) Put as many new and existing workloads in this environment as possible
Private/hybrid cloud solution criteria
· Must deliver value prop – faster, better, cheaper
· Minimize solution cost – build, populate, run over time
· Maximize the number of workloads in new environment
Keep this card in your wallet. Pull it out and look at it when considering private cloud solutions. Or when you have a “Forest for the trees” moment with your implementation.
Keep a close eye on all three aspects of solution cost. Especially if considering free software that requires 15 python developers to get it to work and run over time. Or a solution that requires a re-write of applications in order to move into cloud environment. Or that doesn’t address existing datacenter reality of multi-tier applications and multiple virtualization platforms. Or, cloud solutions that can’t also be used to deploy and manage the physical and virtual environments.
