Page 93 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

JUST O V ER THE HORIZON, PRIV ATE CL OUDS

tence. It merely needs to be cheaper than the architecture in
the data center that preceded it. If it is, the private cloud’s ad-
vocates will have a firm business case for building it out. We’ll
discuss security further in Chapter 6.

Hardware Choices for the Private Cloud

Part of the argument for adopting public cloud computing is
that companies pay only for what they use, without an up-front
outlay in capital expense. But that argument can also be
turned on its head and used for the private cloud. An IT man-
ager could say, “We’re making the capital investment anyway.

We have 100 servers that will need a hardware refresh later
this year. Why not use this purchase as the first step toward
converting our data center into something resembling those
external clouds?” The benefits of private clouds will flow out
of such decision making.
Google is building its own servers because the configura-
tions of servers in the marketplace so far do not meet the
cost/benefit requirements of its cloud architecture. If Google,
Yahoo!, and others continue to publish information on their

data centers, the data center managers at companies will fig-
ure out how to approximate a similar hardware makeup. In-
deed, Dell is rapidly shifting gears from being a personal
computing and business computing supplier to becoming a
cloud supplier as well. As I was working on a report at the 2009
Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, Barton George, Dell’s
newly appointed cloud computing evangelist, poked his head

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