Virtual Private Clouds on Public Infrastructure

There’s no doubt that interest in private cloud computing is growing rapidly. But just because a cloud is private doesn’t mean it will be running on-premise. In fact, chances are that most private cloud computing implementations will run on public cloud infrastructure.

Simple IT economics will make it more cost effective to run "virtual data centers" in the cloud rather than on-premise. Those that are run on-premise will be the exception driven by the need to comply with regulations or unique performance requirements.

One of the cloud computing providers trying to get an early jump on providing virtual data centers in the cloud is BlueLock. At the VMworld 2010 conference, BlueLock was one of three cloud computing providers selected to participate in the beta program for the new VMware vCloud Director orchestration engine.

According to Brian Wolff, vice president of sales for BlueLock, the goal will be to leverage VMware vCloud Director running on-premise and in the cloud to make it to automatically shift application workloads across virtual data centers that will span a hybrid private cloud on both the customer’s site and the BlueLock data center. To facilitate that, BlueLock has announced the availability of BlueLock Connector, a plug-in that allows VMware sites to manage a private cloud spanning their site and the BlueLock data centers under a common interface.

The question that most IT organizations will have to resolve is how many application workloads will really need to run on-premise. Wolff says that at least until IT organization get comfortable with virtual data centers; most will continue to run their mission-critical applications on-premise. But as the whole concept of federated cloud computing evolves, it won’t be long before more of those application workloads move to the cloud as well.