Cloud Hosting

Private cloud involves a multi-layered approach to architecting IT systems and delivering services to the business, making the most of virtualisation to provide a separation between the two.

There is no clever magic involved, nor does there have to be anything particularly special about the servers, storage and networking equipment used. Rather, it is a question of arranging resources in the right way and using management software to make the most of them.

To understand how things need to look, we can consider private cloud in terms of supply-side capabilities that consider physical assets and demand-side capabilities that focus on how services are delivered.

The trick, if there is one, is to ensure that supply-side capabilities are adequate, and to use software automation to enable these to be provisioned and managed in the most efficient way.

Underlying both supply and demand is the requirement for resilience to be built into the infrastructure.

Private cloud adoption involves consolidating multiple applications onto a reduced hardware footprint, which therefore increases the risk of failure.

If power goes down to a single server running a single application, for example, only one application is lost. But if a server is running multiple virtual machines, the damage could be far greater.

So it is important to ensure adequate provision is made for redundancy and failover across the architecture.

Operational management of supply-side capabilities requires a clear understanding of the server, storage and networking infrastructure and how it is packaged into logical units.

To an extent this equates to good, honest, traditional IT operations configuration management of equipment, components and firmware versions, patching status and so on.

Read this article:
Can your cloud balance supply and demand?