Creating and managing your own internal cloud computing infrastructure.

Much of the focus in the “Cloud Computing” universe is to do with integrating external services like Amazon AWS into your company’s way of working. This is fine if you are a start-  on the Internet primarily, but for those businesses in more traditional markets this can be a difficult transition, and often one that makes little sense. Creating an “Internal Cloud” infrastructure however makes sense for many organisations with large numbers of servers, especially in terms of server deployment, management and internal book keeping/expense tracking.

An internal cloud is (at least for the purposes of this article) an infrastructure that is managed via remote access only, meaning via web interfaces and software connections only. When a new server is required by the Sales team to host a new tool, say a CRM system, they request it via internal channels. The provisioning of the server is done via a web interface on the internal IT infrastructure. The size and type of server is specified along with the department (cost centre) for internal billing.

The cloud software then creates a physical or virtual server based on the request and provides details as to how to connect to the server via email. Depending on the situation, this may be all that is needed, if further customization of the server is required IT connect remotely and make these changes. Should a server cease to be needed, it can be removed from service via a web interface and the hardware made available for other purposes.

At the end of each month/quarter IT produce a report (from the cloud software), that breaks down the server costs by department for internal billing.

A cloud based infrastructure automates much of the manual intervention that adds cost to a server farm. It also provides efficiency gains in terms of speed of provisioning and re-allocation of hardware assets. This can result in savings in staff, electricity and cooling for example. It can also be beneficial in the speed at which changes can be dealt with, be they planned or unplanned.

For example, a cloud based infrastructure is able to adjust to a hardware failure automatically. Should a physical server fail, the application based on the server can be restarted on another physical or virtual server by the cloud software itself, without human intervention. Planned deployments can be vastly quicker also as the physical elements of creating a new server are removed (such as cabling power and data leads); also Operating System installations and even application installations can be automated.

But thats not all…

A cloud based infrastructure can be interacted with via software, allowing not only people but other software to create servers as required. You could quite easily tell your website load balancer to start an extra web server if load was too hide, and also shut that extra server down if not needed later. You could integrate into your internal applications hooks to manage the server infrastructure based on a variety of factors. Perhaps you’d like your accounting software to create an extra server to process reports on at month end? Maybe you need to start an extra database server when you start the de-duplication process on your sales database?

The benefits of cloud computing for entirely internal server infrastructures are yet to reach mainstream acceptance, in part because the cloud computing hype is mainly around external services, which although incredibly powerful are not a panacea that will solve many business requirements.

Internal cloud computing is also cheaper and easier in many ways to test and evaluate, a spare server can easily become the hub of a test cloud computing infrastructure. Your IT team can easily start creatinng example implementations and running pilot projects within the company, without incurring costs from external services like Amazon and also being confident that there are no security issues to contend with. Pilot projects can, once proven, easily become production solutions and migration of existing infrastructure to the new internal cloud can be a phased ongoing project.

enVirtua is of course available to help with both pilot projects and large scale migrations. Please contact us on email: sales@envirtua.com or
Phone: 020 7193 8987 to discuss your ideas on how an internal cloud might work in your business situation.