On 1 October, the Gartner Group released a report entitled Private Cloud Matures, Hybrid Cloud is Next. In it analyst Thomas Bittman says that 50% of enterprises will have a hybrid cloud solution by 2017 so they can enjoy the speed of provisioning, automatic response to varying demand and alignment of their internal architecture to public cloud standards.
Richard Vester, director of EOH Cloud Services says that South African enterprises can also pursue this trend.

“In the corporate enterprise market a lot of companies have already invested a lot of CAPEX into infrastructure,” he says.

“And they are reluctant just to write it off and move their applications to a service provider with a cloud service. So we’ve taken the approach that instead of going to companies and telling them to write their kit off and move their apps to our infrastructure, we can wrap our EOH Cloud Manager over their existing infrastructure to create a cloud-based infrastructure.

“In reality, most local corporates are 80-90% virtualized but using a consolidation technology. By layering our cloud-based management over this we enable a private cloud for them. So immediately they get rapid deployment, cost visibility, workflow, who’s deploying what and how much it’s costing.”

EOH Cloud Manager has a Web-based single control panel for all aspects of the cloud infrastructure. Vester says there are number of automatic benefits.

“Customers can then extend their applications and computing resources to our data centre. There are some subtle benefits to that. Firstly it’s the single interface. When they deploy their workloads, they can pick where they want to deploy it. A short term development environment could be spun up with us without being locked into a long-term contract with an external provider.

“And our management tool will take care of that time period for them too. The operating systems and applications can be templetised. We have Microsoft and JD Edwards templates for example that can be spun up in a very short space of time.

“Secondly, many corporate companies will buy technology from a supplier for virtualisation but don’t actually have visibility into the CPU, storage or networking usage in their virtualised environment.

“That means they could be running at 90-95% capacity and if they fall over then it might take six weeks to get more hardware. Or it’s the converse: they’re running at 20% and don’t actually need to get more kit just yet – but they don’t know that for sure.”

Vester says that several companies are already using EOH Cloud Services with great success.

“Customers with large data centres that have invested in substantial amounts of hardware, some of which may still be new, can benefit from wrapping the EOH cloud management solution around their infrastructure.

“This provides our customers with a private cloud capability but immediately gives them the benefit of the hybrid cloud, through a single interface allowing them to deploy directly onto a secure hosted infrastructure for quick, scalable and short terms deployments.”

Vester adds that by allowing for replication of mission-critical systems, as well as a number of other benefits, the hybrid cloud can provide full failover and replicated, archiveable backup services.

“The hybrid cloud offers cost savings as well as peace of mind.”