While talking about Private Clouds on Twitter, Sam Johnston (who is currently with Google and involved in OCCI , Cloud Audit, etc.) used to refer to them as #notacloud. His argument is that the so called Private Clouds are nothing but virtualization with management interface slapped around it. Even though he may be partially true, I don’t want to dismiss Private Clouds so easily. In my opinion, private clouds are a bit more sophisticated than some automation + virtualization. Well, today I was reading a CNET article about Microsoft’s Private Cloud plans and it reminded me of @samj ‘s dismissal of Private Cloud as #NotACloud.In an interview with CNET, Bob Muglia, President of Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business, talked about Windows Azure and other topics related to the cloud. On a specific query asking if Microsoft’s idea of Private Cloud resemble Windows Azure more or the current version of Windows Server OS, Mr. Muglia answers as follows
Well, remember Windows Azure is designed to run at a scale of tens of thousands of servers. Really no customer is running at that kind of scale. So, there’s definitely capabilities in Azure that are interesting, but frankly they go beyond what most customers — really what all customers would need to build their own cloud and their own data center.Windows Server and Hyper-V are very much structured to be able to build your own private cloud, absolutely. The area where we see probably the greatest set of evolution happening is in System Center, and let me give you some examples. We will evolve System Center to have capabilities like self-service so that departments, business units within an organization can provision their own instances of the cloud to really virtual machines within the cloud to run their own applications.
Well, it just reminds me of @samj’s dismissal of Private Clouds during many of the Twitbates (Twitter Debates) with folks from companies such as Cisco and others. Microsoft’s Private Cloud, as oversimplified by Bob Mugalia, is simply #NotACloud. Enough said.
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I think that ‘private clouds’, whatever that actually means, are important stepping stones to ‘real clouds’ for a lot of businesses. I think that some organisations will feel more comfortable moving to a private cloud in the short term.