Page 97 - 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

can be spread around the pool so that the load is balanced
across the available servers. If more capacity is needed for a
particular workload, the private cloud, like the public cloud,
would be elastic. The workload can be moved to where that ca-
pacity already exists, or more hardware can be brought on line
to add capacity. After disposing of peak loads, any server that

isn’t needed can be shut down to save energy.
Furthermore, the end users of the private cloud can self-
provision themselves with any kind of computer—a virtual
machine to run in the cloud—that they wish. The private
cloud can measure their use of the virtual machine and bill
their department for hours of use based on the operating
costs for the type of system they chose. This self-provisioning

and chargeback system is already available through the major
virtualization software vendors as what’s called a “lab man-
ager.” That product was aimed at a group of users who are
likely to be keenly interested in self-provisioning—the soft-
ware developers who need different types of software environ-
ments in which to test-drive their code. After they know that
their code will run as intended, they turn it over to a second
group of potential private cloud users, the quality assurance
managers. These managers want to test the code for the load

it can carry—how many concurrent users, how many transac-
tions at one time? They want to make sure that it does the
work intended and will work with other pieces of software that
must depend on its output.
Software development, testing, and quality assurance is a
major expense in most companies’ IT budget. If the private
cloud can have an impact on that expense, then there is an

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