It's an article about some of the issues around private cloud computing feasibility more or less.  My thoughts were:

I thought this was an interesting article and the numbers you show are mostly inline with my own research in my endeavor to provide enterprise cloud computing services as a hybrid private community cloud.

I've also been writing some of my thinking about these same issues at my own blog, www.productionscale.com.

In general, I think that there is beginning to be some maturity and consensus as to the various cloud deployment models with the work of NIST, Jericho, and others.

Also, the realization for most that cloud computing is not a specific technology. It is much more an operational and architectural model emerging into broader use and understanding from many years of great work in various fields of computer science.

In my opinion, private clouds of different types make great sense. In particular when you consider security, compliance, and transparency issues related to enterprise utilization of such things.

In particular, it listed three deployment models for cloud computing:

1. Public clouds. These deliver the best economies of scale, but their shared infrastructure model can limit configuration, security, and SLA specificity, making them a less-than-ideal fit for services using sensitive data that is subject to compliancy or safe harbor regulations.
2. Internal clouds. These sit within your data center and behind company-built protections, but they typically have modest economies of scale due to funding limitations and tend to be less automated.
3. Hosted clouds. Hosted clouds run at a service provider on resources that are walled off with enterprise-class protections but managed as a pool. These fall between the first two options, providing more custom protections like an internal cloud but with the greater economies of scale of being a service from a cloud provider.

Another set of deployment models come from NIST that I've posted here before:
http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing/index.html

• Private cloud. The cloud infrastructure is operated solely for an organization. It may be managed by the organization or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise.
• Community cloud. The cloud infrastructure is shared by several organizations and supports a specific community that has shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations).
• Public cloud. The cloud infrastructure is made available to the general public or a large industry group and is owned by an organization selling cloud services.
• Hybrid cloud. The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more clouds (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting).

What's interesting to me is that each of these calls out a few specific points of reference that delineate them. They are:

• Where is the infrastructure physically?
• Who owns the infrastructure(aka Pays the bills)?
• Who uses the infrastructure?
• How is the infrastructure accessed?

Christofer Hoff has done a lot of good thinking on this and his thoughts are well summed up here and worth a read: http://www.rationalsurvivability.com/blog/?p=743

He produced a nice diagram that I think is quite good.

source: http://www.rationalsurvivability.com/blog/?p=743

In any event, there is some seeming convergence occuring in the cloud deployment model thinking here and there.  I'm pleased to see this occuring for sure.  Things have come a long way in a short time.

Lately I decided to eat my own dog food and launched www.legalcloud.net. I've been developing, deploying, and testing this Cloud Computing IaaS/PaaS service with my new business partner and host of top notch technology partners. It is an enterprise cloud computing service focused on the IT needs of Law Firms; hence the name. But, LegalCloud.net doesn't seem to fall into any of the leading or popular cloud computing paradigms that are emerging. First though, an aside of a couple of things I've learned in the last few months.  Perhaps they are obvious, but these are statements based on my actual efforts and experiences.

I learned quickly when I started nScaled that very few customers are ready to go 100% to cloud right now.  I thought there were more.  It will happen over time gradually I think. But, it requires a certain amount of different thinking that isn't very prevalent yet and many of the tools are still catching up that make this style of computing most effective.  But, much can be done right now!

I also learned that very few, as a proportion of all potential customers, in any niche or vertical that might benefit from Cloud Computing know what Cloud Computing is, does, or provides. This is not made easier by the massive of information and pseudo-information flowing about this subject. I recently said that Cloud Computing is a technology architecture evolution that, when properly applied to business problems, can enable a business revolution.  I believe this now more than ever.  But, to be clear, Cloud Computing is not necessarily any one technology. It is, I think, a more distributed architectural and even an operational approach to computing that does create the potential for something a bit new and very exciting.

Back to my problem though, here is what NIST is saying about Cloud Computing deployment models; as they phrase them.

• Private cloud. The cloud infrastructure is owned or leased by a single organization and is operated solely for that organization.

• Community cloud. The cloud infrastructure is shared by several organizations and supports a specific community that has shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations).

• Public cloud. The cloud infrastructure is owned by an organization selling cloud services to the general public or to a large industry group.

• Hybrid cloud. The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more clouds (internal, community, or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting).

For the record, I really like the NIST position even if it does kind of leave my efforts out as it is currently written.  But, they just called me a Private Community Public cloud.  Or, a hybrid sort-of cloud.  I think.

The NIST definition as written doesn't allow for a Community Cloud as a Managed Service owned by a 3rd party organization but operated specifically for one community and served up on-demand.  In my case, that community is Law Firms. nScaled, the company behind LegalCloud.net is the "organization selling cloud services" on-demand. LegalCloud.net is cloud IaaS that also provides some platform tier services as well (some now and more on the road map).

So, you can see, that we simply don't fit into the NIST model very well.  But, I think it's a draft.  Maybe we'll fit later.

Another model that I'm fond of that I was turned onto by Christofer Hoff is the Jericho Forums Cloud Cube Model. This one says that I am building a Proprietary, External, Perimiterized cloud computing service where the perimiterization is virtualized through the use of VPN's and MPLS. This I like very much!  But try saying that to a client showing them the Jericho cube!  Sales would just not scale I'm afraid.  My business partner looks at me askew when I try to use stuff like that on him too; no love at all despite my personal fondness for the model.

So, what can I call this thing that I'm building? I think that I'm leaning towards something like:

LegalCloud (tm) - A Secure, Managed, External Community Cloud

That's what I'm building, staffing, and selling. It is cloud computing in a variety of ways. LegalCloud.net is still early stages so, I can't claim I'm 100% cloudified yet.  It'll take some time.  But, we'll get there.

Anyway, I certainly want to be writing more but, like I said on twitter a few days ago, I can talk about this stuff all day or I can just go out there and do it.  I'm doing it.  So, I'll still be wrinting here for a long time to come I think.  But, my posts are almost sure to be spread out a bit further over time.

As always, happy to hear opinions and thoughts from others.  I love that this is a rapidly evolving space with so much room for innovation and value creation!

A few months ago I posted an article about a Drupal stack that I had tested w/ a big media company to do 2.5 billion page views a a month. It was a lot of servers and some sophisticated modifications to Drupal.

It's still a solid architecture but there are some new entries I thought I'd like to evaluate. I also deployed that one on Joyent so I was curious what I might be able to do with other cloud vendors. This time I picked Rackspace's Cloud Servers since they were kind enough to comp. nScaled, Inc. a little free time to test things out an demo to clients. So, I've been beating up on them pretty good. I'm impressed and considering what I did to some of their servers yesterday I'm surprised I didn't get a cease and desist!

Here is the Drupal Stack I built and configured.

Here's the top of the items that grabbed my attention

Cloud Computing as a paradigm shift is a significant technological evolution that has the power to drive a revolution for how businesses and technology relate to one another and operate together.

The article goes into good detail starting with the ideas:

• Atomicity
• Statelessness
• Idempotence
• Parallelism

These are all very important.  I won't be repeating all the various fine definitions of each here.

from the comment I posted. . .

One might argue that when you ask "Where are we headed next" and say, "a combination of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS," you are talking about a private cloud deployment on-premise or off-premise in a traditional managed or co-location data center connected to the corporate network just like any 3rd party site would be but managed using cloud management tools the likes of AppLogic, Appistry, OpenQRM, Eucalyptus, Enomaly ECP, Nimbus, Gigaspaces or others.

You own or rent the hardware (networking and servers), you install the appropriate fabric management (cloud management tools) software for your needs. You mix in the platform as a service tools (like Appistry or GigaspacesXAP). Spread the SaaS icing on top of your own custom built software (as a service w/ an API) or use something commercial (like Zimbra) for your SaaS tier if it fits.

Where we are headed next is to the broad realization that this rapid and expansive burst of information technology innovation into the main stream branded as "cloud computing" is the path forward to the next-generation of IT deployment, development, and management both inside and outside the data center with linkage to the public cloud computing vendors resources to use them as needed and pay as you go. Work being done along the lines of VPN-Cubed is crucial when we are headed is towards a public/private hybrid model that will push the boundaries of what our networks can do more than ever before. Let's hope all that Internet 2 work and related research is panning out. We're going to need it!

It's a great time to be in IT! Fantastic things happening all around all day every day.

The press releases and such were okay. But, the real info is in the PDF you find a little deeper in the site.

http://www.cohesiveft.com/dnld/VPN-Cubed-for-EC2-Pay_2009-3-4.pdf

I won't go into all that here of course, it's quite a long document. However, one important thing to realize is that essentially, a VPN-Cubed AMI is analogous to a software router/switch/VPN aggreggator combo device. This adds some very interesting possibilities to deployment in hybrid cloud deployments or all EC2 deployments. It's well worth the time to get to know this technology. I have no doubt I'll be writing more about this over time.

Congratulations to CohesiveFT on making such rapid and important progress on the Cloud security front!

Brief Introduction

A 50% reduction in costs with an associated ten fold increase in available capacity has been achieved by various SaaS vendors migrating their infrastructure to Amazon Web Services and those of other cloud vendors. The competitive advantage of an impact of this magnitude on the business model is ignored by SaaS providers at their peril.

http://www.nscaled.com

Thanks!

-Kent

Here is my newest version of this diagram which builds upon some of the earlier work posted in this blog.Cloud Computing Stack 
I do need to give some credit where credit is due as some of my thinking came from marking up a very nice diagram done by Lamia Youseff.  Here is the marked up version I did when she released that diagram a while back.Cloud Computing from Lamia Youseff (Marked up by Kent)

One of the the rather interesting things to point out is that again and again I come down to four things replicated up and down the stack.  They are storage, memory, network, and compute.

I've seen an awful lot of buzz in this "ontology" area recently so I'm hoping this adds some value here and not more noise.  We shall see!  Let me know what you think.

I expect to write more about my thinking here in coming days and weeks. I've been testing this diagram out a lot with people and using it to explain things like traditional hosting in relation to cloud computing / hosting, explain why people call SaaS a cloud, explain what the hosting providers relationship is to the server supplier, virtualization vendors, and more. It's been pretty useful for me thus far.

A excerpt from a recent InfoWeek article states, "Using the cloud, Eli Lilly can now deploy a new server in three minutes (instead of 50+ days) and can get a 64-node Linux cluster online in five minutes (instead of 100 days). Those types of technological breakthroughs can help IT teams cut maintenance costs and fund innovation. And at Eli Lilly, the managerial breakthrough came when it focused on the cloud's possibilities instead of its uncertainties."

That is profound change. So, naturally, that led to some deep thoughts. Well, maybe not Jack Handey deep, but deep none the less!

Cloud computing technologies make the Information Technology department into a cutting edge business innovation engine. An engine that delivers a competitive edge to the businesses for which it works. How long does it take you to deploy new servers for your business units? Would simply doing it faster yield a positive ROI for you? I'd say in many cases the answer would be yes.

"Do or do Not... there is no try." -Yoda

Warren Buffet has been one of the greatest allocators of capital in modern times. His work and efforts are truly humbling to us mere mortals. However, geeks may have their day as the Warren Buffet of the future may just be an excellent allocators of compute, storage, network, and memory in cloud-like technology deployments! It's my opinon that the effective allocation and management of technology can yield far better than average returns on dollars spent.

What I'm proposing is that the effective allocation of technology, perhaps call it "technical capital" with better process, provisioning, and management via Cloud Technologies can make almost any businesses more effective and competitive. This, in my opinion, is the act of a business becomming more technically agile.

Every day in business is asking the question of what is the most effective time and money allocation I can do now and in the future. Converting time and money, which is what it's all about anyway, into technical capital and investing it for maximum return on investment is very wise. Dollar for dollar the mindful allocation of technical capital can have a dramatic and disruptive effect on the effectiveness of any business and it's overall operating capacity. Cases such as the Eli Lilly example above or another recent example provided by Geir Ramleth, the CIO of Bechtel show this very clearly. "Ramleth knew a more drastic shift in how IT services are delivered would be necessary to support the company's complex, distributed business model." Ramleth knew this three years ago! He was well ahead of the curve acting when others were not even thinking yet. Let's not forget that resistance to change is a significant barrier. The friction one might encounter when trying to displace time and money with disruptive technologies like On-Demand or Cloud Computing is substantial. Prepare for that eventuality as well.

I think it's safe to say that most companies would not be pleased if their competitor had harnessed a new technology that gave them great advantage in a similar industry or vertical. I think it's safe to say that, in some cases, Cloud Computing technologies provides something a technological economy of scale that is difficult to overcome. This is quite evident in the case of an early mover like Google. The computing power of the Google cloud is overwhelming and has always been a competitive advantage for Google.

It's my thinking that it is, in large part, quite reasonable to take Cloud Computing and it's related technologies seriously. Their ability to help harness the true value of technical capital thereby leading to a more technically agile business lends itself to real analysis and eventual, and I think relatively rapid, implementation in many use cases.