Private Cloud Computing for Enterprises
What You Will Learn
Enterprise data centers are faced with a critical challenge: The number of applications and amount of data in the data center continues their rapid growth, while IT struggles to provide the resources necessary to make services available to users and meet today’s demands using existing infrastructure and organizational silos.
For too long, this siloed approach has hindered IT from adjusting dynamically to new business requests. In existing silos, application workloads are tightly coupled to physical assets, with software linked to operating systems to manage availability, enforce security, and help ensure performance. This tightly coupled model has resulted in a proliferation of server and storage devices, with attendant costs and maintenance overhead, to meet user demand.
Unfortunately, only a small portion of each dollar spent on IT today creates a direct business benefit. Customers are spending approximately 70 percent of their budgets on operations, and only 30 percent on differentiating the business. Since data center IT, assets become obsolete approximately every 5 years, the vast majority of IT investment is spent on upgrading various pieces of infrastructure and providing redundancy and recoverability: activities that consume approximately 60 to 80 percent of IT expenditures without necessarily providing optimal business value or innovation. In addition, the return on investment (ROI) for new IT projects can take anywhere from 9 to 18 months.
As a result, IT has been forced to focus on simply keeping the data center running rather than on delivering the kind of innovation that meets user needs for faster, better services while also meeting requirements and ensuring business agility.
What is needed is a solution with the scale, flexibility, and transparency to enable IT to provision new services quickly and cost-effectively by using service-level agreements (SLAs) to address IT requirements and policies, meet the demands of high utilization, and dynamically respond to change, in addition to providing security and high performance.
Cloud computing provides a solution for meeting this challenge and using the Cisco® portfolio of products, enterprises can begin moving toward a cloud computing solution today.
The Enterprise Cloud Computing Model
Cloud computing is being proposed as one answer to the challenges of IT silos— inefficiencies, high costs, and ongoing support and maintenance concerns—and increasing user demand for services. While transactional data and high-performance file share applications are best handled now within enterprise data centers, cloud computing is demonstrating its ability to handle the increasing Internet data from rich web applications, services from online service providers, large data processing jobs, and digital media creation with follow-on global distribution.
In addition, many industry analysts and businesses agree on the cloud computing opportunity. In 2008, total spending on cloud computing services was estimated to have a 27 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2008 and 2012, growing from US$16 billion to US$42 billion, according to IDC; cloud services are projected to grow at 5 times the rate of current enterprise IT spending.
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