James Staten – Jumpstart Your Private Cloud: Good Vendor Solutions Abound

Forrester surveys show that enterprise infrastructure & operations (I&O) teams that are well down the virtualization path are shifting their priorities to deploying a private cloud. While you can certainly build your own, you don’t have to anymore. There’s an abundance of vendor solutions that can make this easier. In response to Forrester client requests for help in selecting the right vendor for their needs we have published our first market overview of private cloud solutions. Through this research we found that there are a variety of offerings suited to different client needs giving you a good landscape to choose from. There are essentially five solution types emerging: 1) enterprise systems management vendors; 2) OS/hypervisor vendors; 3) converged infrastructure solutions; 4) pure-play cloud solutions; and 5) grid-derived solutions. Each brings the core IaaS features as well as unique differentiating value.

How should you choose which one is right for you? That very much depends on which vendors you already have relationships with, what type of cloud you want to deploy, where you want to start from and what you hope to get out of the cloud once it is deployed.

More of the Forrester blog post from James Staten

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.