Yes, there is such a thing as a private cloud. No, it’s not the same thing as having lots of virtual machines on your data center’s servers.

It’s the beginning of a new year, and I’ve already had someone ask me why they should bother with a private cloud when they already had lots and lots of virtual machines (VM)s in their data center.

Excuse me as I bang my head against the wall.

Guys, guys, if a cloud was just a bunch of servers, virtual or otherwise, we’d still be stuck in the ’90s. Oh, that’s right. Some of you still are.

OK, I’ll make it simple. Flip open your copy of the National Institute and Technology’s (NIST), The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing and read aloud with me from page 2:

The private cloud is not the same thing as a data center. More>