Private clouds, hosted or on-premise, are rapidly becoming commonplace. More and more businesses are learning of cloud computing and seeing that running their own cloud is both feasible and potentially valuable.
But due to a general lack of cloud knowledge, it is becoming more and more common that clouds are recommended when they do not suit the needs of the business at all. Often this happens when people confuse private clouds with traditional virtualization management systems.
The Differences Between Virtualization and Cloud Computing
A cloud is a special type of virtualization platform and fills a unique niche. Cloud computing takes traditional virtualization and layers it with automated scaling and provisioning that allows for rapid, horizontal scaling of applications. This is not a normal business need.
Cloud also lends itself, and is often tied to, self-service of resource provisioning. But this alone does not make an IT environment a cloud nor justify the move to a cloud platform—although it could be an added incentive.
What makes the cloud interesting is the ability to provide self-service portals to end users and the ability for applications to self-provision themselves. These are the critical aspects that set a cloud platform apart from traditional virtualization.
However, you don’t have to set up a cloud in order to gain features such as simplified whole-domain system management from a single pane of glass, large-scale consolidation, easy migration between hardware systems, rapid provisioning of new systems, high availability, etc. These features are all available in other ways, primarily through or on top of standard platform virtualization.
It is not that these features cannot be made available in a private cloud, but these features are not aspects of the cloud. Rather, they are aspects of the underlying virtualization platform. The cloud layer is above these and simply passes through the benefits of the underlying layers.
Often companies move to the cloud because they mistakenly believe that many of the features commonly associated with private clouds are not available in some other, simpler form. This is rarely the case.
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Stephan Cico, SR Director, TigerCloud
