There are many many articles written extolling the benefits of ‘cloud technology’. However, most of these are written by a supplier or specialised consultant – meaning they aren’t independent. There are also reports written on the subject by consulting companies, but these tend to be theoretical and ‘up in the clouds’ (if you will excuse the pun) – they aren’t based on real-life experience.

What is a ‘private cloud’ ? There are many definitions, but here I am referring to the use of virtualised processing and storage technology for your company’s use. This can be hosted on your site, or hosted with a service provider for your own use. Many of the points mentioned are also relevant to public cloud services.

Here are some real-life benefits of using the technology .

To anticipate one question up-front, I am not affiliated in any way to any product or service provider. My (day) job is to manage IT resources and services for a very large financial services company. My comments here are based on my real-life experiences.

The benefits of using private cloud technology

Firstly, there are the obvious benefits that you can easily visualise. For example ….

A ‘private cloud’ allows you to gain the benefits of the technology without the security concerns you may have with public cloud services.
Reduced space in your racks. Note that this may not necessarily mean that your rack floor-space reduces – that depends on whether you can virtualise enough physical server equipment to remove an entire rack.

If you host rack space externally and pay per rack, you can potentially reduce your costs if you can free-up an entire rack of equipment (don’t forget that some suppliers offer half-rack solutions)..

Less physical equipment = less power consumption, lower costs and good for the environment.
Less physical equipment = less heat generated, so the air conditioning units use less power consumption, hence lower costs and good for the environment.
Less physical equipment = reduced maintenance costs.
Backups can be centralised and taken from the centralised storage instead of the individual servers.
On the assumption that your solution includes storage replication, application availability is improved because recovery time from an outage is reduced.

But the other benefits aren’t so obvious ….

Traditionally, providing disaster recovery/contingency/replicated systems that can be used in the event of an incident are a pain ! They need specialist replication or mirroring software, duplicate hardware and constant monitoring. With a replicated SAN, that headache disappears, because the data at your primary site is automatically replicated to your contingency site.

Not only is this built-in replication an operational relief, but it means that when you deploy new services, there is far less infrastructure work to do, because the server and its data is automatically replicated.

With physical servers, you may have several functions running on a server, to save on the physical servers you needed. With virtual servers, you can create a virtual server for each function without the previous overhead. This makes upgrades and maintenance on the applications easier.
You will read from product vendors that efficiency benefits mean your System Administrators can manage up-to three times more systems because they are virtualised. Be careful about using any headcount savings when justifying your investment. This is because it depends on the size of your IT team, how many physical servers will be virtualised and what else the System Administrators do.

Remember that these benefits are largely around the physical activities. In each virtual server ‘container’ is the logical server that was previously running on its own physical equipment. By ‘logical server’, I am referring to the business application; for example it could be Microsoft Windows 2008 server with SQL Server and a business application. This still needs as much support as when it was a separate physical instance.

The most significant benefit I have seen is more important than reducing costs. It is the fact that your IT Infrastructure team’s focus becomes less about engineering and more business focused. This is because there is less physical infrastructure to support and maintain.

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Real-life benefits of private Cloud technology