1. Get rid of the data center and communicate with all people who have an impact on the business.
Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus, an open source private cloud provider, pointed out that this will help IT executives better understand how private clouds will eventually be used. At present, Eucalyptus has always maintained a close relationship with Amazon's public cloud solution. Mickos told us a story about a big client doing business in the technology industry. In order to carry out business, this big customer created a private cloud to support enterprise development/testing. Mickos said: "Because it is not clear how many' customers' they will consume private clouds, the number of their customers is increasing by 50% every quarter." The scale of the private cloud was created by the IT team according to the previous test level, but users found it very easy to prepare and conduct tests, so they wanted to conduct more tests.
2. Set user expectations
Jim O'Neill, chief information officer of HubSpot, said, "Many people know that cloud automation will promote cost savings." HubSpot is a cloud-based marketing service provider, whose marketing services can access Amazon's public cloud or Rackspace-hosted private cloud infrastructure. "Therefore, you must make developers and enterprise users realize that they must pay for excellent service. Even if they already know the economic advantages of cloud services, you must make them fully understand that in the case of three 9' s budget funds, don't expect the normal running time of five 9' s. " O' Neill said.
Lauren Nelson, an analyst at Forrester, believes that the economics of private clouds vary depending on the type of workload users want to run on them. "If the application is volatile and written to run on the public cloud, then basic computing is very cheap on the public cloud. If applications require intensive computing or nonstandard virtual machines that require a lot of I/O or memory, it is definitely more economical to run these applications on a private cloud. " Nelson said.
3. Encourage users to use private clouds.
Andrew Hillier of CiRBA, a professional capacity management software provider for virtualization and cloud environment, suggested that IT departments should consider some incentives to encourage users to make full use of the new private cloud infrastructure. Hillier said: "Compulsory use can't solve the problem at all."
4. Don't be obsessed with outdated data center equipment.
In order to better understand which parts of the data center and the basic network will hinder the development of private cloud applications, we must be brave enough to break the status quo. Macentee said, "List all the equipment in use and non-standard functions. Give up the patented function of your preferred router or firewall and find some alternatives. You may like a certain OpenFlow function provided by a router manufacturer, but you may have to give it up. Only in this way can you strictly abide by open standards and don't have to worry about any patented functions. "
5. Ensure that existing applications are migrating to the private cloud.
Torsten Volk, an analyst at EMA (Enterprise Management Association), said: "The main reason why private cloud projects fail in enterprises is that they are only used for new projects." In fact, enterprises must have a careful plan covering existing business applications to evaluate whether the initial cost of public cloud is reasonable. Mickos of Eucalyptus explained that these measures need to transform the application, so as to be aware of the possible failure risk of the basic business infrastructure at any time and figure out how to effectively make other virtual machines run on the private cloud.