CIOIN

At the most basic level, most businesses want one very simple thing: To spend less time and money building and managing infrastructure and more resources directly adding value to the business. From a business standpoint, IT infrastructure is an expensive and time-consuming distraction to getting actual work done.

As IT professionals, we can easily deride such ideas as fanciful daydreaming. After all, you can't deliver the kinds of integrated information management tools that the business needs to survive without an infrastructure for them to run on. However, this is the backdrop against which business units everywhere are drawn to the promise of public cloud-based offerings that require next to no lead time or capital expenditure to implement. The hyper-elastic public cloud would seem to be the silver bullet that offers the agility and scalability craved by business.

However, the public cloud is also afflicted with a wide variety of pitfalls and uncertainty. Putting all of your eggs in someone else's basket is scary enough to prevent most businesses from dumping their own infrastructure.

It's clear that business needs a way to deliver the same kinds of agility and scalability on its own terms and with resources it can directly control. That means consolidating server and storage resources to yield better utilization, trimming management overhead wherever possible through automation, and offering business units the ability to provision their own services. Therein lies the promise and challenge of the private cloud.

Network and Storage

Though it needn't be an overnight transformation, the journey of implementing a private cloud will inevitably touch every level of your infrastructure. Aggressive virtualization and automation software are the two obvious components that most people think of when they hear the words "private cloud." However, stopping there leaves out some of the most important components of the datacenter: The network and storage.

Anyone who has virtualized all or part of their datacenter is already familiar with the enormous benefits of doing so. You can consolidate your workloads onto general-purpose server hardware, implement secure multi-tenancy, and manage your compute resources as a single, commoditized pool that can be scaled non-disruptively.

These benefits in concert with the management flexibility to reshuffle and balance workloads among different server resources make an incredibly powerful combination. It's no wonder that virtualization is so popular.

With converged networking hardware, those same virtualization concepts can be applied to the network. By combining all I/O onto the same high-bandwidth network fabric, you can achieve the same types of operational efficiencies. 

Innovations in storage technology pave the way to eerily similar gains. Instead of allocating separate storage resources for every server, virtualized storage arrays spread storage load throughout available hardware. Likewise, multi-tier storage can be managed autonomously by the storage hardware, with frequently used data retained in faster storage, while less-used data is gradually migrated to slower, less expensive storage. 

All for One, One for All

Better still, each of these layers of infrastructure provide symbiotic benefits to one another. The high utilization density that can be achieved through server virtualization allows you to make better use of those high-bandwidth converged networking ports you've deployed. Some converged networking vendors also allow you to integrate the provisioning of networking resources with that of virtualized workloads—further increasing operational efficiency and capabilities.

Similarly, tighter integration between modern storage offerings and virtualization platforms brings performance and management gains to the virtualization layer. These can be delivered through support for hypervisor-specific features such as VMware's vStorage API, which allows many storage-intensive tasks to be off-loaded directly onto the storage system or through hooks into the virtualization management tools. Conversely, the intelligence in modern storage systems can take advantage of virtualization-based thin provisioning, which allows the storage to free unused space and eliminate most storage overprovisioning—one of the largest sources of waste present in storage infrastructures.

While the guts of a private cloud revolve around management software and a healthy serving of virtualization, stopping there ignores a large part of the value proposition. The private cloud is really a unifying concept built on consolidation of resources and management that draws together advances being made in virtualization, converged networking, and intelligent storage—all of which can combine to form a whole greater than the sum of their parts.