Private Cloud Guide | CloudLogically

Definitive Guide

Private

Private Cloud

Cloud

Planning and consideration of your current and future needs and priorities

Swineburn University

Turns to Nutanix for Self-Service Private Cloud

With Nutanix, Swinburne University in Australia successfully developed a comprehensive private cloud that incorporates automation features, simplifying operations for both staff and students. The benefits of this solution include:

Cloud technologies are essential in addressing agility challenges. However, the outcomes of migrating enterprise workloads to the public cloud have been varied.

Nutanix has become part of our self-service suite, within which students can browse and pick development stacks they need for their projects and deploy them with one click, similar to an app store.

The Private Cloud

Designing an effective private cloud requires careful planning and consideration of your current and future needs and priorities. A private cloud for enterprise needs should be built on a foundation of HCI and should provide self-service capabilities, app-centric security, and reliable data protection and disaster recovery.

Business Need for Private Cloud

There are two pressing needs for any enterprise to succeed in the digital economy:

Enhanced Security and Compliance: Private clouds offer a higher level of security compared to public clouds, as they are dedicated to a single organization. This is particularly crucial for businesses that handle sensitive data and must comply with strict regulatory requirements.
Greater Control and Customization: With a private cloud, organizations have complete control over their infrastructure, allowing for tailored configurations that meet specific business needs. This flexibility enables companies to optimize performance and resource allocation.
Predictable Costs: Private cloud solutions often provide a more predictable cost structure, allowing organizations to budget more effectively. This is especially beneficial for enterprises with stable workloads that require consistent resource usage.
Improved Performance: By utilizing dedicated resources, private clouds can deliver better performance and reliability. Organizations can ensure that their applications run smoothly without the risk of resource contention that can occur in public cloud environments.

Support for Legacy Systems: Many organizations have existing legacy systems that may not be compatible with public cloud solutions. A private cloud can provide a bridge, allowing businesses to modernize their IT infrastructure while still supporting older applications.
Facilitating Digital Transformation: As businesses strive for digital transformation, private clouds can serve as a foundation for deploying new technologies and applications. They enable organizations to innovate and respond quickly to market changes.
Streamlined IT Management: Private clouds often come with automation capabilities that simplify IT management tasks. This allows IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than routine maintenance, improving overall efficiency.

Where are Businesses Running Apps and Workloads?

Where do enterprises stand in their cloud journeys, and where are they currently hosting critical applications and workloads? 

The answers to this question vary widely among organizations, but it’s valuable to explore the prevailing trends. As previously noted, a significant portion of enterprise IT budgets continues to be allocated to on-premises solutions. However, let’s take a closer look at some of the broader trends related to public cloud, software-as-a-service (SaaS), private cloud, and traditional infrastructure.

Public Cloud

Enterprises leverage the public cloud to meet a diverse range of use cases, including:

Scalability: Public cloud services allow organizations to easily scale resources up or down based on demand, making it ideal for fluctuating workloads.
Disaster Recovery and Backup: Public cloud solutions provide robust options for data backup and disaster recovery, ensuring business continuity in the event of an outage.
Development and Testing: The public cloud offers a flexible environment for developers to quickly set up and tear down testing and development environments.
Collaboration Tools: Many enterprises use public cloud services to facilitate collaboration among teams, providing access to shared tools and resources from anywhere.

Cost Efficiency: By using a pay-as-you-go model, businesses can reduce capital expenditures and only pay for the resources they consume.
Big Data Analytics: Organizations can harness the power of the public cloud to process and analyze large datasets, enabling data-driven decision-making.
Global Reach: Public cloud providers have data centers around the world, allowing enterprises to deploy applications closer to their users for improved performance and reduced latency.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Applications: Businesses often utilize public cloud platforms to access SaaS applications, which offer ready-to-use software solutions without the need for on-premises installation.

By tapping into these capabilities, enterprises can enhance their operational efficiency and drive innovation while minimizing the complexities associated with managing their own infrastructure.

Private Cloud And Traditional IT

Private cloud and traditional IT are combined under a single heading because the line between the two remains a bit blurry. This is because not everyone defines private cloud the same way. When we asked about infrastructure environments, 52% said they were running on-premises private cloud, 37% said they were running hybrid cloud, and only 11% said they were running traditional IT.

When the same survey asked respondents about these capabilities, only about 27% indicated that they had fully implemented each feature or were close. Roughly 50% said they were getting there, while 22% didn’t have the capability or were just starting. While it’s up to you to define the capabilities of your private cloud, Nutanix believes that these four capabilities should be priorities for anyone planning a private cloud deployment.

However, the 52% number for private cloud still seems optimistic. This number is likely more aspirational than a reflection of the current reality. By most definitions, a private cloud should include capabilities such as:

Inadequate Performance and Availability:

In a private cloud environment, gaining visibility into the performance requirements of individual workloads can be challenging. Workloads may also change rapidly as users start and stop virtual machines (VMs) and applications, leading to potential performance degradation where one workload adversely affects another. Additionally, if the private cloud is not well-architected, it may create single points of failure, bottlenecks, and other issues that compromise overall availability.
Unpredictable Scaling:

In a dynamic and expanding private cloud environment, forecasting when performance limitations will be reached—particularly in terms of I/O performance—can be difficult. The need for various types of storage can make scaling both disruptive and costly. An effective architecture should streamline the scaling process, while appropriate tools should enhance monitoring of resource consumption and support effective capacity planning.

Private Cloud Challenges

Where do enterprises stand in their cloud journeys, and where are they currently hosting critical applications and workloads? 

Inflexible Architecture:

Your private cloud must be capable of accommodating a diverse range of application requirements, from traditional enterprise applications to cloud-native solutions. However, rigid infrastructure software and three-tier architectures can hinder this adaptability.
Complex Data Services:

Enterprise environments often require a private cloud that supports both block and file storage services, in addition to the object storage typically found in public clouds. Meeting these varied needs may necessitate the deployment and management of different hardware for each data service, which can increase costs and complexity. Furthermore, maintaining separate storage pools can lead to lower overall capacity utilization and reduced flexibility. Given the critical role of data in digital transformation, addressing this challenge is essential.
Brittle Automation:

An inflexible architecture combined with complex data services can complicate automation efforts within a private cloud. This results in longer development times for automation processes, a higher likelihood of automation failures, and increased complexity in troubleshooting and maintenance.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure at the Core

Implementing a private cloud on top of traditional three-tier enterprise IT infrastructure, which consists of separate servers and storage connected via storage networks, can be quite challenging. Despite its familiarity, this type of infrastructure contributes to many of the issues outlined earlier. Different virtual machines (VMs) can negatively impact one another, scaling becomes difficult, responsiveness to business needs is slow, and management is complicated. This traditional infrastructure is a key reason why many early private cloud deployments have failed to meet expectations.

Organizations are increasingly realizing that they can achieve better results with their private cloud initiatives more quickly by utilizing hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) building blocks. These blocks provide both compute and storage capacity on each node, similar to the architecture employed by many large public cloud providers. The right HCI solution offers essential cloud benefits, including self-healing capabilities, simplified capacity planning, easier automation, and reduced management overhead.

Research by Nutanix shows that enterprises adopting HCI are significantly further along in delivering critical private cloud capabilities such as self-service, automation, dynamic scalability, and chargeback compared to those that do not adopt HCI. This is likely because HCI simplifies the delivery of these capabilities, with some HCI solutions offering them out of the box.

As illustrated in Figure 3, HCI adopters are much more likely to report having fully implemented these key capabilities and are less likely to indicate minimal progress. The streamlined architecture of HCI supports self-service, automation, and dynamic scalability, while also making chargeback implementation easier due to centralized control. As discussed in Chapter 4, the right HCI architecture effectively addresses the most pressing private cloud challenges by providing a flexible framework that adapts to various needs and significantly simplifies management.

As illustrated in Figure 3, HCI adopters are much more likely to report having fully implemented these key capabilities and are less likely to indicate minimal progress. The streamlined architecture of HCI supports self-service, automation, and dynamic scalability, while also making chargeback implementation easier due to centralized control. As discussed in Chapter 4, the right HCI architecture effectively addresses the most pressing private cloud challenges by providing a flexible framework that adapts to various needs and significantly simplifies management.

Definitive Guide

Private

Private Cloud

Cloud

Swineburn University

Turns to Nutanix for Self-Service Private Cloud

The Private Cloud

Business Need for Private Cloud

Where are Businesses Running Apps and Workloads?

Public Cloud

Private Cloud

Hybrid Cloud

Public Cloud

Private Cloud And Traditional IT

Private Cloud Challenges

Hyperconverged Infrastructure at the Core

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