Purpose-built private clouds
SunTrust bank is another institution whose high security needs spurred it in the direction of private cloud. The company is taking a unique path. "Our longer term strategy around cloud computing is this: We are building a series of private, internally hosted clouds that are very much purpose-driven," explains Rich Gilbert, senior vice president for information technology and services at SunTrust.
In other words, the company is building separate clouds geared specifically toward their applications. For instance, the company is currently working on a cloud that will support its virtual desktop infrastructure. "VDI apps are very I/O intensive," Gilbert says. "So instead of using a general cloud, we'll build it specially to support that workload."
SunTrust is also building a test and development cloud that will be designed as a more all-purpose cloud with a self-service capability. That cloud will have an equal mix of VMware and Microsoft cloud software.
The bank regards its private clouds as an interim step. Once the company is running applications on its private clouds, it hopes to evaluate whether one day it might be better to offload them into a software-as-a-service or externally hosted private environment. "The longer term challenge is... how do we become more of a service broker than a service builder?" Gilbert says.
It has taken steps in that direction with its archiving system. Around 18 months ago it started evaluating options for document and email archiving and retention. Using an external private cloud for archiving turned out to be a better bet than building in-house, Gilbert explains. When looking at the value add of archiving in-house, including building the service and ongoing support, it made more sense to use the external service, he says. The service is hosted by Viewpointe.
Performance as motivator
In addition to security reasons, if a business has very high performance needs, a private cloud can help.
Nokia Research and Nokia Siemens Networks -- two separate companies -- both built private clouds for security and performance reasons.
For Nokia Research, neither a public cloud nor the production corporate network was a viable option. Since Nokia Research compute resources are used by researchers who are toying around with new projects that could be unstable, it's too risky to run these systems on the corporate network where they could potentially cause trouble, says Alex Bederov, systems architect at Nokia Research.
And because the projects are confidential, "legal just wouldn't allow us" to use a public cloud, he explains.
Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), a company with an annual R&D budget of 1.7 billion euros, had some similar needs as Nokia Research, with an added twist.
It had a VMware-based data center, used by researchers, that had performance problems and so was running some workloads without virtualization. It began looking for a way to both homogenize its environment and introduce more flexibility for researchers, says Janne Heino, product manager of cloud solutions R&D for NSN.