Private Cloud
Verb IT’s Clifford says that, unsurprisingly, many organisations are struggling to come to grips with the Cloud and are searching for ways to develop private Clouds as a tentative first step.
“A facility like this gives them a stepping stone through infrastructure as a service, as they still have access to hardware,” he says. “They may not have it on site but they can iLO [Integrated Lights Out remote manage]. They can still access the services, provision their own virtual machines and Cloud link from here if they want.
“It seems to be far better to give people layers one to three on the old ISO layer and enable systems integrators or customers themselves to provision that Cloud out from here.”
Tier 5’s Gauvin also says PMDCs can be viewed as a means to dabble in the private Cloud; at the very least, as a way to tie their IT spend more closely to value creation.
“If I am a Commonwealth Bank and am going to build a $100 million data centre that will last me 25 years and I have to pay for that now, that is likely to be seen by the board as a cost,” he says.
“Whereas, if you can deploy a private Cloud, why not then look at it from the point of view of how you buy your DC capacity? If I can buy 12 racks at a time it won’t be stuck among everyone else’s racks. These are my racks and I have control over them and can get them designed to my specification, but I don’t have to buy them all at once; I don’t have to buy the next 25 years of capacity in one go.
“So, it is not just demand for private Cloud; it is data centre construction that is aligned to the cost model of private Cloud which makes this pretty attractive.”
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