According to IDC predictions, spending in the private cloud market will increase by 11.1% year over year to $13.9bn in 2016.
While it is less than the $24.4bn predicted for public cloud IT infrastructure, it highlights that a large amount of IT infrastructure spending is going to private cloud infrastructure.
The reasons for this are numerous; a desire to maintain control over data and applications, higher regulatory and security requirements, or perhaps a distrust of the public cloud.
The reality is that cloud expenditure will likely continue to be split between private and public, with public leading the way and private continuing to form an integral part of enterprise IT.
Given that private cloud isn’t going away anytime soon CBR looks at five of the best options in the market, in no particular order.
VMware
According to a Wikibon report, VMware was tied for first place with HPE for “true private cloud” with 7% of the market, while Forrester named it a private cloud market leader.
The company says that more than 500,000 enterprises use its technology for private clouds.
VMware, which is best known for its virtualisation software on which many private clouds run, also offers the vRealise Suite Cloud Management Platform, Cloud
Foundation, and other private cloud offerings such as vCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud, vCloud Air Hybrid Cloud Manager, and vCloud Air Dedicated Cloud.
The company’s vSphere and ESXi products, a hypervisor platform running atop the operating system, are designed to provide the virtualisation foundation for IT workloads running on top of most enterprise operating systems.
VMware recently held its annual conference in Barcelona where it rediscovered its image.
IBM
IBM was found to have 4% of the true private cloud market in 2015, according to Wikibon, while Forrester labelled it a leader in private cloud software suites for Q1 of 2016.
Like others in this list IBM isn’t solely focused on hybrid cloud as it also offers a public cloud, it is more closely tied to a hybrid cloud solution.
The company offers IBM Cloud Managed Services, Cloud Manager and Cloud Orchestrator, in addition to a VPC and a Private Modular Cloud.
The Private Modular Cloud is an automated private cloud that the company says is capable of removing the bottlenecks that can result from manual setups of middleware provisioning. It offers full automation across infrastructure and middleware and can scale to as many as 10,000 virtual machines.
Big Blue also offers hardware for these cloud solutions such as IBM Systems, IBM Storage, and cloud solutions for its Systems z mainframe platform.
HPE
Synergy Research places HPE as the biggest provider of private cloud hardware in the second quarter or 2016 with more than 20% of the market, but its private cloud offerings span more than just hardware.
The company also offers software and services, many of which are under the Helion brand name such as the Helion Cloud Suite, Helion CloudSystem, and Helion Managed Private Cloud.
Since HPE exited the public cloud market it has set about providing the best solutions for private cloud and hybrid cloud deployments. Connections to the likes of Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services have helped to build out its hybrid cloud vision.
The HPE Helion Managed Private Cloud aims to offer companies a service that is maintained and operated by HPE and offers a virtual private platform to provide infrastructure services without the cost of owning and managing equipment or a data centre.
Rackspace
Recently made a private company in a $4.3bn deal in August, Rackspace has positioned itself as the number one managed cloud company.
Rackspace offers a set of cloud computing products and services that are billed on a utility computing basis.
The company has done a good job of connecting to technologies created by other companies in order to provide three private cloud technology stacks.
The Rackspace Private Cloud powered by VMware vCloud offers a single-tenant hosted private cloud that can scale up to 2,000 physical nodes per vCloud Director Instance.
Rackspace Private Cloud powered by Microsoft Cloud Platform offers a fully dedicated, self-service platform for production workloads and can scale up to thousands of physical nodes per Windows Azure Portal.
The third private cloud is the Rackspace Private Cloud powered by OpenStack, this is built to run enterprise production workloads with a 99.99% OpenStack API uptime guarantee.
OpenStack
The new kid on the block, OpenStack was dubbed a science project only a few years ago but has now set about becoming the standard for cloud deployments.
The open source cloud software can be used for both styles of cloud deployment, but it is the private cloud where it has really made its name.
OpenStack can manage compute, storage and networking and can be used with VMware’s ESXI, Microsoft’s Hyper-V, or Citrix Xen.
The real draw of the cloud is the fact that it is open source and allows a lot more built in flexibility than most options in the market.
The community is made up numerous companies such as HPE, Red Hat, IBM, Rackspace, Dell EMC, and many more, all of which have created OpenStack offerings of their own.
Its biggest problems have been the amount of choice available, leading to complexity, and the lack of skilled engineers which has helped to make it a little more costly for some use cases.
