Private Cloud?

What the hell is a private cloud? It's almost bizzaro that everyone is talking about cloud computing and most people can't even agree on when it's a cloud and when it's not. Let's recap... :)

When you plug your hair-dryer into electrical socket in your living room (and it turns on), you have no idea where that power is coming from. It might be coming from that power plant near your business partner's condo, it might be coming from that nuclear (pronounced New-Q-Lar, that's apparently the Republican pronunciation) power plant that's up the road a bit, or it might be coming from somewhere else. The point is that you don't know and it isn't very easy to figure out.

This is the same way that Google's search engine works. You throw something into that search bar, it throws it out into the cloud, and somehow, within microseconds, huge piles of servers, that could be located anywhere in the world, decide what to send back to you and BAM!, it appears on your screen. Where did that come from? You don't know and it isn't very easy to figure out. That's cloud computing, my friends.

If you think that throwing a bunch of servers into a rack at a datacenter and giving your customers some terminal server licenses is cloud computing, you are way off base. That's just hosted services..and there's nothing wrong with that, it's just not a cloud.

Like everything else that we do, our company is building out a hybrid suite of services based upon our Guaranteed Networks IT management platform. Our solution, through proprietary equipment, as well as partnership with established hosted infrastructure providers, will create the best of all worlds. We don't believe in the one-size fits all approach. We know that some customers will want premise based computing, others will want to go to a data center, some of them will demand a cloud but almost every one will require a hybrid solution...and that's what we intend to deliver. We're delivering it right now.

The other day, someone told me they were building a "private cloud". Instantly, I thought that was brilliant. I imagined a series of redundant data centers, linked with a backend private fiber infrastructure (that didn't hit the Internet), and all kinds of security and data loss prevention measures on the front-end. I got very excitied. This is what we're doing...with data centers in Miami, Boca Raton, Atlanta and Nashville.

After talking for a little while, I realized that he was just building a bad-ass Citrix server and providing some hosted services for his clients. You can imagine my disappointment. On the up-side, he taught me the lingo..."private cloud". Then I realized, hey...we're building a private cloud too. Unfortunately, the terminology is already getting misused. I guess I need a new name for what we're building.

What are you guys building? I promise not to steal the name. :)

- R