Guest blog written by Tim Golden, Chief Technology Officer, HP ISS Americas
Private cloud and virtualization are two closely related technologies. Virtualization provides the fundamental layers that take the cloud from a concept to a functioning solution. But confusion still abounds over the similarities of these technologies and how to progressively add them to your environment. For enterprises that have utilized virtualized datacenters for years, the common question is—do I have a private cloud?
Private cloud offers elasticity and automation for your processes, while still operating in a secure, contained environment. This flexibility allows your organization to easily allocate or retract resources so they are best utilized. The goal of a private cloud is to automate provisioning and allows you to perform more work than a single host machine will allow.
Using virtual machines to manage your server workloads also provides your enterprise architecture with elasticity and cost savings. Virtualization allows your company to decrease server real estate and perform the amount of work one server that once took 8 to 10 lightly-loaded servers. When that server reaches capacity with its virtual load, an additional physical machine still needs to be added—the key difference between cloud and virtualization.
2011: The year of virtualization
The migration to public cloud services is currently one of the hottest topics in IT, and Gartner's latest forecast found that spending in this area is projected to grow four times faster than spending on overall IT. The worldwide public cloud services spending forecast is predicted to total $89 billion in 2011, up from $74 billion in 2010. The market is forecast to reach $177 billion by 2015.
According the TechTarget’s 2011 IT Priorities Survey, released in January, server virtualization is the top priority for IT managers in 2011. Of the survey’s 2,300 global respondents, 56% said server virtualization will be keeping them busy this year. That’s up from 46% in last year’s survey (where server virtualization also topped the list).
We will have to wait and see if the predictions proved true this year. Even if 2011 isn’t quite the outburst it was initially anticipated to be, we will be feeling the reverberations for years to come from the virtualization and private cloud migration.
Virtualization: one of the initial stepping stones to the cloud
Building a private cloud is more than simply adding virtual machines to physical servers. Enterprises need to plan their infrastructure for virtualization and security issues while looking beyond simply consolidating servers. The move to a private cloud is a process that takes time and the proper updates and upgrades.
Do not fear, if your enterprise is currently operating in a virtualized environment the move to the cloud will be easier than if you were only utilizing physical machines. Moving to the cloud is much more of an implementable solution when the proper building blocks are in place.
For more information on how you can combine cloud computing with your traditional IT Infrastructure to create an IT model that is best for you see HP Cloud Computing Solutions. To learn more on how you can make more efficient use of your server, storage and software assets see HP Virtual Solutions.
