Private Cloud on the Cheap

Only the richest companies seem to offer public cloud services, or at least make a big name for themselves. Just think of the words Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. So it stands to reason it takes more than a few bucks to build a private cloud. After all, these elastic, self-provisioning capacity-on-demand, always-on utilities are built on highly virtualized orchestrated servers. While that is a mouthful, that's what private clouds in essence are all about.

Aaron Bawcom, CTO for Reflex Systems, is happy to sell you private cloud wares. But he also wants to save you some dough and recently penned a piece about saving money on private clouds without ending up with a hunk of junk.

As a virtualization management player, Reflex is obviously concerned with, er, virtualization management. Having a bunch of cheap servers running a bunch of uncontrolled VMs is not a private cloud -- it's a mess.

The key, if you are working with a service provider, is asking the right questions. How many pieces is the solution made of, or is it all one install? Are professional services needed at any point? Is it turnkey or does your shop have to script or develop around it? If the latter, is all this done in one language or script tool?

Once installed and running, how much of the management is automated versus requires your attendance?

I'm only scratching the surface. If you're itching for more info, head here.

Posted by Doug Barney on 06/26/2012 at 12:47 PM