According to many cloud experts private cloud is a failure in India. The reason which I see is, its understanding is not very clear to many. For some it might sound like an oxymoron. But yes, private cloud is a valid term and yes; it can help your organization in many ways if deployed well. So here is a quick premier on why should you anyways consider a private cloud this budgeting season.
1. Your Gateway to the Cloud: Private cloud can actually act as an enabler for you to adapt enterprise wide cloud computing. This not only gives you flexibility to try all the benefits of cloud in a confined and secure environment of your own organization, but also enables the servers to migrate to a public cloud when need be after they are virtualized in your own cloud.
This means, you can run a virtual server in your own private cloud till the time the requirements are low. And the moment the requirements surge (which is called cloud bust in such cases), instead of investing on new resources, you can just extend your private cloud to a Public Cloud offering and migrate your virtual server there, ether permanently or just for the cloud burst period.
2.
Save your Datacentre: To get the benefits of cloud, you do not need to ditch your existing datacentre. You can convert your existing datacentre or a part of it into a private cloud to start harnessing the benefits of Cloud. At the Hardware end, all you need is, Servers which support for Type 1 Hypervisors and SAN. Which most likely you already will be having in place.
At the software side, you will require a cloud computing middleware. Here you have a lot of opensource options if you don’t want to jump into investing right away. Some examples could be
Eucalyptus, or
OpenStack which comes from a joint effort of NASA and RackSpace and powers the core of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.
And if you already have planned for an investment, then
VMWare offers some great solutions for Private Cloud. Also keep an eye open for upcoming
Microsoft’s Server 8 which is going to have Private Cloud functionality out of the box. And not to forget, it’s interoperability with HyperV.
3. Confidential and Reliable: whatever said and done. The
Amazon EC2 also goes down! And that too for hours. So, if you really are so concern about reliability. Or you deal with James Bond Grade sensitive content, or may be slightly less than that; then you also might consider a Private cloud. As mentioned before, this will provide you the benefits of cloud such as elasticity, easy VM replication, easy DR, etc. and at the same time you will not let your data go out your company premises (read firewall).
4. Easy manageability: If you have migrated from physical to virtual in the recent past, you must have noticed a huge benefit in terms of manageability. With virtualization, your server admin has become capable of adding up more CPUs and RAM or storage for that matter to a running Virtual machine, and that too on the fly to see how the application load is mitigated.
Private cloud will take you a few steps further. Unlike virtualization, with private cloud your Server Admin is not just allocating CPUs or RAM to a virtual machine to check the effects on the application performance. Instead, the application running on the cloud can scale up by itself when it has more jobs to do, and free up the resources when it’s rather free.
5. Control of deployment: If you go for public cloud players, you might find yourself in a spot where your choice of cloud service provider don’t lets you run your choice of custom Linux Kernel, or your favourite operating system.
So, if in case you have a very customized environment with your pre compiled and modified OS kernels or you use one of the few niche operating systems, then you might find yourself out of luck while selecting a public cloud provider.
But on the other hand, if you are building your own cloud, you have the luxury of frying your eggs your own way!
Anindya Roy 
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