I have learned that things mean different things to different people. I don’t think many organisations have fully adopted private cloud capabilities (in fact some are nowhere close). (and there is probably no correct answer here – highly subjective).
So what should a private cloud offer – my 2 pennies:
1. To virtualise the existing estate and create new virtual servers when needed.
2. To offer the business ‘self service’ so they can request from a service catalogue and automatically have services provisioned.
3. To manage the infrastructure relationships in a dynamic way (clearly understand impact when upgrading infrastructure components).
4. To manage the facilities in a dynamic way (clearly understand when the business needs services and at what performance level – smartgrid awareness).
5. To align business applications to service patterns instead of a pick and mix approach. (Do you need service a which offers resilience x, performance y).
6. To be able to clearly show the ‘active’ monitoring of business services (not just monitoring infrastructure).
7. Roadmap to untangle legacy complexity to improve business and application agility (support SaaS)
8. To use all of the above to minimise downtime while maximising performance at minimal cost.
This list is not exhaustive, but perhaps it sets the scene on why I dont think the true ethos of private cloud has been ‘done’