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Private Cloud Storage: Bringing True Cloud Storage In-House

Private clouds allow organizations to bring the benefits of cloud computing in house. A private cloud can transform IT operations, providing capabilities like elasticity, multi-tenancy and self-service provisioning.

The private cloud should do the same for storage—but in reality, private cloud storage is often provisioned using aging storage infrastructure. Traditional data backup and storage equipment cannot really achieve cloud scale and match the elasticity and flexibility expected from cloud infrastructure.

In this article you will learn:

What is a Private Cloud?

A private cloud is cloud computing infrastructure that is used by one organization, typically by multiple units within the organization, called consumers. The essential aspect of a private cloud is that it is completely isolated from other organizations.

Contrary to common thinking, private clouds are not only deployed on-premises. A private cloud can be owned by one organization and managed by another organization (a service provider) in a different physical location.

According to the National Institute for Standards and Technology, in order to be considered a private cloud, a computing system must:

  1. Provide on-demand self service to computing resources
  2. Make resources accessible from any type of device
  3. Pool resources with multi-tenant resource allocation
  4. Enable elasticity, with the ability to auto-scale resources up and down
  5. Rating and metering, with resources billed to consumers or allocated according to quotas

What is Private Cloud Storage?

Private cloud storage is a service model for provisioning storage to users in an organization. Just like a private cloud offers compute resources on-demand (for example, Linux machines), it can also offer storage on-demand, with the same private cloud capabilities: on-demand access, resource pooling, elasticity and metering.

Organizations usually invest in private cloud storage to satisfy compliance or security requirements. Another use case is on-premises applications that require high-latency or high-throughput access to data, making it necessary to place the storage physically near to the storage consumer.

Private Cloud Storage Capabilities

Ideally, private cloud storage should be offered as a service. Like other private cloud resources, it should support:

While public cloud storage services like Amazon S3 offer unlimited scalability, private cloud storage is inherently limited to the storage equipment maintained internally by the organization. Storage may be operated using traditional equipment like hard disks, SAN or NAS, which may limit the organization’s ability to perform resources pooling and multi-tenancy.

Cloudian Hyperstore is an example of a storage appliance that provides full cloud computing capabilities, by clustering storage nodes and enabling true resource pooling with Software Defined Storage. Hyperstore enables multi-tenancy for multiple consumers within the organization, and allows the organization to scale up storage effortlessly by plugging in additional storage nodes.

Benefits and Challenges of Private Cloud Storage

Private cloud storage needs special justification, because it involves heavy capital expenses and complex maintenance, while equivalent services are available on the public cloud with pay-per-use pricing.

Benefits of private cloud storage

Challenges of private cloud storage

Achieving True Cloud Storage On-Premises with Next-Gen Distributed Storage

Cloudian HyperStore can help alleviate the complexity and scalability issues of traditional storage equipment in a private cloud scenario.

 

HyperStore is a low-cost, cloud-scale storage solution you can deploy on-premises to gain all the capabilities of cloud storage services like Amazon S3. It provides a multi-tenant architecture that lets you set up a storage cluster and share it among multiple applications and business units. You can manage Quality of Service and set usage quotas, backups, and security policies separately for each tenant. HyperStore even offers built-in metering and billing capabilities.

Learn how to lower your storage total cost of ownership with our TCO calculator

 

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