Choose the Right Private Cloud Solution for Your Workloads

When it comes to cloud adoption, there are a wide range of decisions you’ll need to make. The first is choosing which workload fits best within a public or private cloud. Organizations with experience in the cloud know that certain workloads thrive in a private cloud environment, while others are able to leverage the unique capabilities of the public cloud.

When choosing a public cloud, you must evaluate the characteristics of each workload. You’ll also need to consider requirements like cost, security, control, scalability, customization, performance and availability. Each consideration will help you evaluate your options to find the suitable cloud for each workload.

With private cloud, the range of options and decisions expands, encompassing diverse technologies, deployment models and operational strategies. In this blog post, we’ll explore your private cloud options and the potential advantages and disadvantages of each.

What are your private cloud options?

Private clouds often refer to a dedicated infrastructure that’s exclusively used by a single organization or entity, but these days they can offer multi-tenant capabilities and emulate many aspects of public clouds. 

A private cloud can be located in an organization's own data center or in another company's data center. It can be managed by the organization or by an outside cloud services provider. Sometimes, the separation from others is only virtual, not physical.

The following table summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of the four leading private cloud options: on-premises, hosted, virtual and managed.

Each of these private cloud operating models can be based on one of many different vendor technologies. In fact, there are blurred lines between these models, depending on the chosen technology. For example, some of the non-hyperscaler cloud software stacks can be run in a hyperscaler, such as the VMware® Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

While private cloud options can be complex, workloads dictate specific demands, which can reduce your options. For example, if an organization is all-in on VMware and intends to maintain that strategically, then it comes down to the following decision tree:

• Do I need physical separation, or will logical separation suffice? If you choose physical separation, then public cloud can be eliminated.
• Do I need on-premises, or will a third-party data center suffice? If you need a third-party data center, then the on-premises option is off the table.
• Do I have the skills and resources to manage it in-house? If you cannot manage it yourself, then hosted and managed solutions are the way to go.

Leading private cloud options

Cloud is about the software stack that delivers flexibility, agility and cost efficiency. So, after you’ve decided to migrate your workloads to a private cloud, it’s time to answer these questions:

• Where will I run my private cloud?
• Which software stack do I need?
• How will we design, build and operate our private cloud?

A few of the leading software choices are VMware, OpenStack®, Kubernetes and bare metal. Here is a quick overview of each.

1. VMware: This is a popular private cloud solution with a huge virtualization installed base, providing a fantastic upgrade path to VMware Cloud and into the world of multicloud services. 
2. OpenStack: This open-source solution has over 40 million cores in production and was initiated by Rackspace Technology® and NASA over a decade ago. It’s an ideal option for businesses that may have very large workloads, or who want to avoid the cost of license fees and lack of flexibility with vendor lock-in. Also, users gain flexibility and complete control of their infrastructure. These benefits make OpenStack popular with telecom providers and research institutions, in particular.
3. Kubernetes:  Containers have become extremely popular as a way to support the introduction of continuous development, integration, testing and deployment processes as well as greater application portability across clouds and operating systems. Kubernetes can be deployed either directly on bare metal or on top of OpenStack or VMware, and the public clouds all offer it as a service.
4. Bare metal: This gives organizations the option to run a proprietary cloud software stack across a network of compute and storage servers — either self-built or hosted.

Providing private cloud-skilled resource teams

Within the realm of private cloud, Rackspace Technology offers a range of services to help organizations pursue a VMware, OpenStack or bare metal strategy. Availability includes multi-tenant (ideal for communities) and dedicated small or large business solutions. Here are our solutions for each option.

Rackspace Private Cloud solutions are supported by services that offer organizations access to a global network of privately interconnected data centers and a portfolio of professional and managed services, including:

• Rackspace Elastic Engineering for VMware
• Rackspace Elastic Engineering for OpenStack
• Rackspace Elastic Engineering for Kubernetes

Rackspace Elastic Engineering is a highly flexible service model that gives organizations on-demand access to a multi-disciplinary team of cloud experts who work with an organization’s IT staff to accelerate projects and deliver targeted business outcomes. This model enables businesses to flex their resource pool according to their business demands.

To make the right decision about moving to private cloud, answer these critical questions:

• What type of private cloud are you looking for?
• Where do you want it to be located?
• What software technology do you want to base it on?
• Do you plan to run your private cloud in-house, or are you looking for a partner to help?

Let us know how our extensive range of private cloud solutions and services can help you.