Storage News

Tips For Building a Private Cloud

An article on TechWorld outlines some of the obstacles related to building a private cloud, including integration with public clouds and the cost of such an endeavor. Major differences between private clouds, virtualization, and traditional data centers – including the separation of hardware from applications – are discussed. The steps involved in building a private cloud – which include the virtualization of storage and network infrastructure – are also outlined.

"Many IT managers equate a private cloud with virtualization. What they describe is usually virtual infrastructure, meaning that 'you can treat your servers, storage and networks as a single pool of resources that workloads can request on demand,' explains Tony Iams, vice president and senior analyst at Ideas International, a research firm with emphasis on enterprise IT infrastructures. "But virtualization and the cloud are not the same thing; to be considered a cloud, the architecture must be set up to provide both orchestration and automation on top of the virtualization layer."