Virtualization is Private Clouds

As I’m looking at the future of virtualization, it’s clear that the evolution of virtualized platforms will drive the revolution of private cloud computing. You can think of private clouds as tiny Amazon EC2s or Force.com’s that are created within your data center for use by those in the enterprise, or virtualized computing resources that provide a much more effective and efficient way to share expensive computing resources.

Enterprises are interested in private clouds since, in many instances, they can’t host their data outside of their firewalls due to privacy and legal issues. Moreover, many of them want to remain in control of their systems and information, and have already made investments in hardware and software that can’t be recovered.

There are a number of startups seeking to support private clouds in this emerging area, and, as you would imagine, the larger data center vendors such as Sun, Cisco, IBM, and Oracle are looking at private cloud computing as a new way to sell their wares. The trick is to define a path toward the use of virtualized private clouds that will be more effective and less expensive, and do so without vendor lock-in. Thus far, the path to private cloud nirvana is not well defined.

So what does private cloud computing have to do with virtualization? Everything, really. Private clouds at their essence are basically virtualized platforms, and thus all of the issues that virtualization has attempted to solve in the past years is applicable there. Indeed, the patters of virtualization and the patterns of cloud computing are almost identical. Thus, the future of virtualization is the construction and management of private clouds.

While many can call this virtualization playing “Buzzword Bingo” it’s the reality of the forthcoming moderation of the enterprise; the need to do much more with much less, and get smarter with sharing resources. While cloud computing will clearly drive some aspects of modern enterprise architecture, the ability to create similar value within existing and paid-for data centers holds much more promise.