Building a private cloud? Don’t overlook orchestration

I was in Phoenix last week speaking about the need to keep an open mind about retaining some (or all) of your servers on-premises as opposed to rolling with the marketing hype over the cloud. Don’t get me wrong: I’m fully confident that the cloud is the future. In fact, for my own company, ClipTraining, the cloud is the present. We have our entire infrastructure in the cloud, and we use Office 365 for our communications and collaboration.

I’m not anti-cloud. But I am against making decisions based on hype. Some organizations simply cannot go to the cloud, and they shouldn’t feel like they’re missing out on the best thing since sliced bread. Much of what they’re looking for in the cloud can be had on-premises through convergence technologies. Such private cloud solutions require some effort, but you’ll be able to maintain control over your data and your security (which public cloud offerings may not provide).

[ InfoWorld has what you need to dig deep into the cloud, both public and private. Download our cloud Deep Dive special reports today! | Stay atop key Microsoft technologies in our Technology: Microsoft newsletter. ]

At a session at that Phoenix conference, Lee Frazier, senior manager for virtualized infrastructure at Insight Technology Solutions, noted that he often speaks to folks who believe they have a private cloud simply because they have virtualized their servers. They don’t, and in fact are likely missing out on so aspects of data center modernization:

• Have they truly standardized on a platform, or are they using disparate network, storage, and virtualization pieces in a mixed bag of infrastructure?
• Have they begun consolidating their environment?
• What virtualization administration are they using?
• Are they offering a self-service portal where the compute, storage, and network are provisioned as a truly automated process?
• Do they have orchestration in place to allow for self-service portals, chargeback, or showback? (Showback is used to raise awareness of the costs for consumption usage without actual bills sent to the departments. Chargeback passes the actual costs to the departments using the resources. Some folks need a tourniquet put on their excessive requests for resources and the resulting overconsumption, and nothing instills cost awareness quite like a bill.)

Some people in the audience knew exactly what Frazier was talking about, but others had no idea. The terminology itself was new to them. That had me thinking the same must be true for some of my readers.

Having the ability to provide orchestration is where the private cloud needs to be. In fact, that’s one of the more appealing aspects about public cloud offerings like Microsoft’s Azure. It’s awesome that I can use a browser interface to rapidly provision servers and resources by simply choosing what I need from a catalog of standard offerings. The same can be done on-premises in a private cloud if you’re using the right orchestration software.

Another value to orchestration is consumption-based metering and capacity planning. With public cloud offerings, you can easily show folks what it will cost to spin up that new server requiring X, Y, and Z services in place with 2TB of storage space. And you can show (or charge) folks in your organization for that consumption.

But legacy on-premises infrastructure doesn’t work that way. Instead, IT is expected to spin up and configure servers and server applications, provide storage, and maintain the environment all for free. But as we move to a modern IT system where IT is like a private consulting group in an organization, it’s essential to be able to provide showback or chargeback numbers to recoup costs and ensure the profitability of IT. (If there is any doubt that IT is moving in that direction, simply consider the fact that service-level agreements, which used to only be necessary for third-party vendors coming in to consult, are now a common practice with in-house IT operations.)

Providing some of these options may feel a bit overwhelming, but there are components already available to help you do this. For example, EMC VMware offers vCenter Chargeback to provide resource metering and reporting. All the major providers offer orchestration options, including Cisco Data Center Orchestration and Microsoft System Center Orchestrator 2012 R2.

Frazier reminds folks how important it is to make informed decisions around their private cloud: “One thing to note about private cloud is how automation and orchestration not just affect the compute layer, but also storage, network, security, and load balancing. Making the right converged infrastructure decisions will allow you to move towards to a private cloud offering when adding orchestration and automation to the stack.”

The future of IT may be completely in the public cloud (in 20 years, perhaps), but the immediate future seems to be the private cloud. This applies not simply to virtualization, but automation and orchestration as well.

The learning curve to accomplishing this has some IT folks jumping into the public cloud prematurely. But with the right help, you can take the intermediate steps through convergence offerings to get a private cloud or hybrid cloud. That will be the stepping-stone to take you to the next-gen public cloud.

This story, “Building a private cloud? Don’t overlook orchestration,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of J. Peter Bruzzese’s Enterprise Windows blog and follow the latest developments in Windows at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.