Private Clouds for SMBs Made Easy

Erik Linask : Convergence Corner
Erik Linask
writer

Private Clouds for SMBs Made Easy

Cloud computing and virtualization – two intimately related technology buzzwords.  In fact, as Nelson Ruest noted this morning at Zenith Infotech’s It’s Your Cloud seminar in Miami, you can’t properly leverage the former without the latter.

In fact, Ruest, who spent two years on a 50-city tour talking about virtualization, defines cloud as a combination of seven virtualization technologies:

  1. Server virtualization
  2. Storage virtualization
  3. Network virtualization
  4. Management virtualization
  5. Desktop virtualization
  6. Application virtualization
  7. User state virtualization

Today, while many IT managers are still trying to understand how to effectively bring virtualization and cloud technologies into their businesses, one of the big changes is that they are now available to businesses of all sizes.  Not unlike other groundbreaking IT and communications technologies, virtualization was once available to only large businesses with IT departments capable of handling installation, configuration, and management of complex virtual environments.

But today, even small businesses have access to “cloud in a box” technology, which includes everything a business needs to implement private cloud infrastructures, eliminating most of the deployment challenges that have traditionally kept virtualization beyond their capabilities.

A private cloud in a box should include (at a minimum), all the components to create a private cloud with redundant nodes with automatic failover, should one node fail.  Once the server pod is installed on the network, businesses are ready to virtualize, with a few simple configuration steps – but without the need to understand the complex tools and architectures that create the private cloud.

With such cloud in a box solutions, virtualization and private cloud is being delivered to any business looking to simplify its IT infrastructure and create new business efficiencies, without requiring IT staff to understand how to deploy and manage all the elements of a cloud infrastructure, including remote storage, hardware clustering, host server configuration, and more.

“There is real value in virtualizing,” says Ruest, “but you need a paradigm shift, where IT must adopt the mentality that resources are shared across all applications and all hardware must become a single resource pool.”

For more information on the It’s Your Cloud series and additional resources on implementing private cloud technologies in your IT infrastructure, or to track the latest developments in private cloud computing, follow @IYCloud on Twitter. Upcoming dates include Denver, October 4th and Chicago, October 5th.


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