Options for creating your Private Cloud

What is a private cloud? In the simplest terms, a private cloud is an in-house, virtualized, on-demand, highly available server-network-storage infrastructure that is shared by multiple departments of the organization. The key differentiators between a virtualized pool of resources and the private cloud is the way in which it is managed. The Operational Services such as provisioning, change management, problem resolution, capacity planning, etc. need to be automated and made accessible to end-users.  Additionally, there is a clear usage-based breakdown of the Opex across the departments (also referred as chargeback).

Options for a  private cloud deployment? Customers have an array of choices depending on their budget, maturity of the IT organization, requirements and workload characteristics.

1. Open-source IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) software: Eucalyptus and OpenStack are the two most popular ones. There are a dozen more and new ones announced frequently! The IaaS software packages a hypervisor (typically Xen, KVM, etc.) and storage virtualization with a web-enabled management infrastructure. Keep in mind, there is no free lunch -- open-source IaaS software is still in its infancy.
2. IaaS software offerings: Yes, you guessed it right. Offerings such as EMC Atmos, DDN WOS,  Mezeo Storage, VMWare vCloud Director, HP Cloud Data Storage System, etc offer IaaS software with compatible APIs to Amazon S3 and other standardization efforts such as SNIA's CDMI, OCCI. IaaS offerings differentiate based on scalability, performance, availability, manageability feature, ease of deployment and upgrades, and the variety of heterogeneous hardware they can virtualize under the hood.
3. Cloud Virtualization appliances: EMC, Cisco, and VMWare announced the VBlocks  as an out-of-the-box pre-configured VMWare ESX servers with Cisco fabric with EMC Storage. This is a great offering for SMBs with limited IT personnel running workloads/applications that do not require a lot of customization. There are a bunch of start-ups in this appliance space as well!
4.  Traditional System Management Tools: This is the opposite of starting from scratch. Unless you are going through a major hardware refresh, this model will be the most popular or pragmatic. The idea is to leverage System Resource Management tools such as IBM's TPC, EMC Unisphere, etc. to automate and gradually virtualize the end-to-end server-network-storage stack. 

Net take-away: If you were a VC investing in Cloud, its a tough time to bet on which deployment model will gain the most market share. Its clear that open-source will eventually win (Linux being a good example), but there is an opportunity window of at least 8-12 years for other models to get the predominant install-base.