It’s Time to Unleash your Private Cloud! Three Simple Use Case Examples

Authored by Stuart Mills, Head of Solutions Marketing, Hosting 

Stuart Mills, Head of Solutions Marketing, Hosting

Hybrid Cloud is on everybody’s lips right now! For at least the last two years we have heard plenty of commentary from analysts, media, tech gurus and vendors about just how cool this new model is going to be, and why all businesses should adopt it. New products have been developed to enable this (hardware, software, software-defined networking, and management tools) and integration between different clouds and vendors are starting to happen.

So now it is time to put down the White Paper and actually start realising the benefits. Here are Three Use Cases for Hybrid Cloud that can be built simply, today.

Extend your Production Private Cloud.

Using the VMware stack as an example, it is now possible to extend your Private (on-premise or hosted) Cloud into a Virtual Private vCloud, to access incremental compute and storage using exactly the same VMware platform as you are used to in-house. Find a provider who can offer a Layer 2 network connection (Software Defined Networking technology) from your cloud to theirs (over Internet or WAN), to enable seamless IP-range extension and hence simple networking and security into your own virtual cloud resources in the vCloud. Control these using a familiar tool like vCloud Director, and do almost anything you can do on your on-prem cloud using the same people, skills and management tools. Next time you need more in-house resources, think about whether expanding into a scalable business-class cloud might be a better long term option.

Use vCloud for Business Continuity.

Using the same Layer 2 product, you can establish a permanent network connection to a virtual private cloud, and replicate virtual machines to the cloud for disaster recovery purposes using something like Zerto or buying DRaaS from a vCloud hosting partner. You can leave Production where it is, and have near-real-time failover to the vCloud if disaster strikes. Find a Hosting partner who can manage the full failover for you, including VM replication, network failover and security policy replication, to ensure a fast start in the event of a problem.

Burst into the Cloud.

Once again, using the same Layer 2 product and permanent network connection to a virtual private cloud, you can now consume as much resource as you want, on a PAYG basis. This is great for bursty applications (like eCommerce using API calls), or for short term needs like project applications, test/dev/UAT and short term production environments. In this way you can save money on having to buy short term resources on your private cloud, and consume resources of any size at a moment’s notice.

The revolution here is the advent of Software Defined Networking to enable Layer 2 connectivity, and the readiness of vendor cloud software to enable multi-tenant control in the cloud. You can try this yourself, but for a fast and low-cost start find a local vCloud Hoster who has this out of the box, and you can extend your Private Cloud into Hybrid today!

We’re proud to be the first in Australia to offer a complete Hybrid Hosting solution using VMware’s NXS network virtualisation product. Learn more about our Hybrid Cloud Solutions here.