Noting the Convergence of Public, Private Clouds

Cloud computing customers today, more often than not, want the best of both worlds. They want access to the inexpensive compute power made possible by a public cloud, but they don’t want to store their data there because of a host of security concerns and regulatory requirements.

That desire is creating a massive opportunity for solution providers to connect private and public clouds over a virtual private network. Instead of storing all their data in a public cloud, customers can use a VPN to run an application workload on a public cloud while retaining control over the private cloud, where the data is actually stored.

Of course, to make that approach work at an enterprise scale, IT organizations are discovering it makes sense to set up those private clouds in hosting centers that are one hop away from an Internet exchange to minimize application latency issues. In general, most of the data centers built by internal IT organizations were never designed to access remote compute resources. As such, those data centers generally are several hops away from an Internet exchange.

None of this has been lost on either storage vendors or the companies that provide hosting services. Both EMC and NetApp, for example, recently announced alliances designed to help IT organizations implement hybrid cloud computing scenarios that incorporate a VPN.

EMC, for example, recently partnered with Equinix and Microsoft to make it easier to store data in a way that makes it possible to invoke compute resources running on the Microsoft Azure cloud. NetApp has a similar arrangement involving FlexPod systems based on Cisco Unified Computing Systems (UCS) configured in a private cloud that can also access Microsoft Azure resources.

Tom Shields, senior manager for Solutions Marketing at NetApp, said that rather than relying on standard Internet connections to access a public cloud, IT organizations running enterprise-class applications want their own dedicated connection to the cloud.

Separately, Interxion Holdings NV has launched Cloud Connect, a private network service that cloud service providers can use to connect data centers in Europe. Mario Galvez, vice president of Product Management for Interxion, noted in light of concerns about data governance as well as a desire to guarantee levels of service, cloud service providers of all types are looking for high-speed Ethernet switching services to connect data centers.

“There looking for networking services that, from a carrier perspective, are open,” said Galvez. “They don’t want to get locked into one carrier.”

As the CEO of Telx, another provider of Internet exchange services, Chris Downie said his company is seeing a lot more demand from IT organizations that want to place their servers in cages that are as close to Internet exchange points as possible.

Of course, somebody has to manage all these connections. For that reason solution providers such as Datapipe are creating specific managed service offerings around VPN services for public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The general expectation for several years now has been that hybrid cloud computing would emerge as the dominant form of cloud computing. Perhaps not so much appreciated until now is how much hybrid cloud computing will depend on the expertise of solution providers in the channel to actually implement.