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Clearly, the list of vendors market share that offer private cloud services is long and getting longer. Vendor solutions for the private cloud are so remarkably numerous – and so remarkably varied – that customers can easily be confused. Sending out a request for proposal (RFP) can produce a patchwork of possibilities. Adding confusion, some pundits accuse vendors of cloud washing – labeling their existing services with the cloud moniker.
Okay, so you want a private cloud – have we got solutions for you. Cloud in a box? In-house private cloud? Remote hosted private cloud in a third party facility? Hybrid cloud? Some combination of these possibilities?
As many businesses begin the private cloud vendor market share selection process, the names that are most top of mind tend to be the marquee players in the cloud space.
These “household name” players include VMware, which has done so much to promote virtualization as a default technology in the enterprise. The company touts its vCloud Director product as capable of offering a software-defined datacenter “in minutes.”
Microsoft offers a private cloud solution – one of many it offers – built using Windows Server with Hyper-V and System Center. In its bid to offer something for every type of customer, Microsoft's menu includes private cloud solutions (in some cases sold through partners) that are custom, pre-configured or hosted. Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform spans hybrid solutions that interoperate with various private cloud deployments.
IBM’s SmartCloud Foundation is part of the larger ecosystem of the company’s integrated cloud solutions. A key part of this toolbox is the IBM PureSystems offerings, which focuses on building and scaling private and hybrid clouds. One of IBM’s advantages in the private cloud sector is its legacy focus on IT consulting services; IBM’s legion of in-house experts provide advice about the many thorny problems involved with a private cloud deployment.
Amazon’s cloud focus is geared more toward the public cloud rather than private. Yet Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) does offer the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. Private cloud provider Eucalyptus touts itself as “The Amazon of the private cloud,” and has an informal seal of approval from Amazon itself. Google, like Amazon, focuses more on public rather than private clouds. The Google Compute Engine enables companies to run large-scale computing workloads atop Linux virtual machines on the search giant’s infrastructure.
Cisco, having scooped up cloud management firm Cloupia, offers both pre-sized solutions like FlexPod and VCE VBlock (in partnership with vendors), as well as its Intelligent Automation for Cloud solution, which includes a self-service portal and an orchestration engine.
Open source vendor Citrix’s CloudPlatform can be used to deploy both hosted private clouds and on-premises private clouds. Fellow open source vendor Red Hat’s OpenShift Enterprise PaaS Solution enables companies to architect an in-house platform (particularly useful for developers) that avoids vendor lock-in; the company points to what it describes as its secure multi-tenant OS. Aiding in this effort is Red Hat’s Virtualization Bundle.
HP, which is now refocusing its business on mobile, cloud and Big Data – touts its CloudSystem Enterprise Systems as offering unified management across private, public and hybrid systems. HP invites cloud clients to “Leverage our cost-effective technology, skills and experience to manage the infrastructure.” Translated: this cloud stuff is complicated and we can help – certainly a phrase that many businesses boarding the cloud train are looking for.
Among Dell’s private cloud solutions is its Cloud Dedicated program, which offers an infrastructure as a service deployment via a private cloud. Dell announced it will spend an impressive $1 billion over the next three years to build out its cloud and data storage offerings. The company rents space in its own data centers to host clouds, so Dell is clearly in the “private cloud, remotely hosted” camp.
Rackspace, as a rapidly growing IT hosting company, is seeing its fortunes rise as the cloud pushes remote hosting as the technology du jour. The firm’s Managed Virtualization offering features VMware virtualization technology. Its Private Cloud Software, a downloadable ISO file, enables clients to install OpenStack compute nodes (see below). Rackspace, by the way, seems to be ripe for acquisition; it’s a successful but smaller player in hot sector. But I digress.
Oracle, whose CEO, Larry Ellison, so famously used to mock the cloud – now has a plethora of private cloud products, from servers to storage to networking to management software. Heck, Oracle even published its own Dummies Guide to Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure, an Oracle Special Edition. That’s commitment to the cloud!
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