Introduction to Private Cloud Providers

Private cloud providers offer Information Technology (IT) services to the business in a secured, controlled, scalable, flexible, regulated way within the internal network’s firewall or hosted through the internet, and such services are offered only to select few instead of the common public. Benefits of Public cloud such as elasticity, self-service are made available to the business along with inherent advantages like customization/complete control of enterprise-owned infrastructure hosted within its own data center or a dedicated infrastructure set up in a third party location.

Some of these service providers sell cloud software, some offer cloud-ready Hardware along with software and allow the internal IT team of the enterprise to manage the entire cloud operation hence the enterprise need to engage staff and incur maintenance cost like datacenter. Few other providers sell private cloud as services virtually.

Let’s go through the details of private cloud providers.

Private Cloud Vendors

A private cloud is a virtual data center operated for an enterprise by an enterprise and the following parameters will have to be evaluated before selecting a service provider.

Multi-Tenancy: A key feature to manage multiple user groups such as Individual users, departments, offices and divisions and share the resources based on requirements.
Billing: Individual user groups need to be billed based on their usage.
Reporting: Consumption of each user groups should be reported
API: Platform should provide interfaces with other service providers and make them available whenever demanded
Delivery: It should deliver resources to the users as a service
Elastic: Scale up and scale down should be possible with ease

Top 10 Private Cloud Providers

Major Service providers in the private cloud arena and their strengths are

1. VMware

It is a popular virtualization software in managing private cloud deployments. One of its main product vSpherestreamlines and automates private cloud operations and service delivery. Another product vRealize a software-defined platform designed specially to manage private cloud and provides intelligent solutions to handle applications to hardware end to end. It has more than 500,000 clients across the work and It is delivered in Enterprise, Standard, Advanced editions.

2. Microsoft

One of the top players in the private cloud market which enjoys more than 40% market share. Its virtualization software Hyer-V is well integrated into the windows server. Azure cloud services are utilized by many enterprises in their pursuit of integrating private cloud deployments in their data centers. This platform provides effective control on enterprise infrastructure, scalability, data recovery set up.It also offers enterprise-wide unified storage solution to consolidate individual storages spread across and cheaper backup solutions.

3. Red hat

This platform offers a variety of cloud solutions using open source technology and enables easy integration with Red Hat cloud services. It offers flexible and agile solutions. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) is the type-1 kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) hypervisor tool, is adopted widely. Apart from RHEV, this platform offer variety of products such as Cloud suite management and development tool, Cloud infrastructure software, Openstack platform, Gluster storage, Container Management, and CloudForms cloud.

Flexibility in managing the cloud operations, High performance, versatility in the offerings, and interoperability are the unique strengths of this platform.

4. Dell

With the merger of EMC, Dell has gained good ground in Private cloud space. Dell and EMC account for 15% market in the private cloud hardware market. It offers Simpler, faster, flexible, lower cost of ownership (TCO) solutions. Its product portfolio includes Virtual private cloud services, cloud security software, Cloud management software and consulting services. This platform has unique features such as Centralized management, Effective monitoring of Application performance, automated delivery, simple configurations.

5. HPE

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is a leading player in this cloud arena and it has got a market share of 20%. Its offering includes Cloud software, hardware, and services. All its cloud products are branded as Helion and it includes CloudSystem Hardware, Cloud software and Managed virtual private cloud and services. Its cloud products offer good control irrespective of the nature of hosting in the private or public or managed cloud.

Unique features of this platform include simplified operations, lower TCO, unified single management window, improved efficiency through automation or Orchestration, and enhanced security. This platform revolutionizes the business and takes it to the next level.

6. Citrix

Its hypervisor offers a secured and highly reliable open source virtualization platform for cloud as well as server and desktop infrastructures. Commercial offering from Citrix is known as Xenserver and it is offered in 4 versions. The benefit of this platform includes Reduction in infrastructure requirements, lower administration cost, minimal complexity, dynamic product updates, simplicity and flexibility in operations, high scalability.

The management console, High availability, Alerting & Monitoring, live migration, effective memory optimization and power management are its unique features.

7. Oracle

This platform enjoys a leadership position similar to HPE and VMware. Oracle VM virtual box is the hypervisor for X86 virtualization acquired from Innotek thru Sun microsystem. Its product portfolio includes Cloud Platforms/Applications, Infrastructure management, and lifecycle management tool. Its services cover Integration services and Managed cloud services. Oracle gives tough challenges to Amazon virtual private services in the private cloud arena.

8. IBM

Its Bluemix cloud product offers a complete solution to move end to end business into Cloud and bring out a complete transformation in the business. IBM offers solutions in Servers and storage, Hosted cloud services, security tools and cloud manager or orchestrator. Portability or Integration, IBM Watson AI functionalities, strong analytics, 130+ services and improvement in programmer’s productivity are its unique features.

9. SAP

SAP HANA Cloud is an in-memory database, open PaaS (Platform as a service) platform. It facilitates faster application development and enhancement of the applications. Due to its columnar database and in-memory computing architecture the data retrieval, analytics and transformation of data are 10 times faster than a normal relational database. This software is ideal for any type of user and Master Data Management, real-time analytics with live data and faster migration are its strengths.

10. Others

Other popular private cloud providers are Cisco, BMC software, NetApp, Platform.sh, Huawei Cloud, Amazon virtual private cloud, Google cloud virtual network, Wolfram private cloud, ASG cloud, CA cloud.

Conclusion

Private cloud provider offers many hosting models and the organization should first spell out the requirements in Application, Interfaces, Delivery and Operational parameters clearly and then evaluate the vendors and their products. They should also take into consideration their current sunk investments in Datacenter and take a prudent call.

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