Internal or Private Clouds

Definition: A cloud environment which creates a pool of resources behind a company's firewall and includes resource management and dynamic allocation, chargeback and support for virtualization.

Companies who are looking to achieve the benefits of cloud computing without the risks are turning to Private Clouds to create cloud-like environments in their own data centers. Doing so essentially means adding a new set of technologies including virtualization management, cloud APIs, self-service portals, and chargeback systems to the existing environment. Private clouds are essentially a more powerful combination of commodity resources that can be sliced and diced into many small pieces, with networking and storage that can be dynamically allocated through preset policies. A Private Cloud may or may not include service governance or contention resolution capabilities.

Benefits of Private Clouds include:

• Reduce TCO for operating infrastructure – hardware, power, cooling
• Increase ROI on existing hardware
• Achieve a more flexible computing environment
• Map capacity to demand (no under- or over-provisioning – buy only what's needed)
• Automate manual provisioning tasks
• Decouple applications from infrastructure constraints
• Ensure capacity is there when you need it