The Cloud Has Been Hacked! Back on premises …

OK. So there are two main reasons why companies are reluctant to go in the “cloud” - concern about security and huge amounts of data. For them, an “on-premises” or “private cloud” solution will make more sense.

The security concern, we’ve heard about it and we’re going to hear about it more and more, as cloud computing matures. There were and there will be security issues with cloud providers. You cannot wait indefinitely, until all problems are gone to implement your cloud solution. I didn’t think I’d recommend this, but I’d say you should not worry about the security. The major cloud providers will take care of this issue for you. Isn’t this why you’re going into the cloud in the first place, so you don’t have to worry about things?

The second concern is for companies that already have huge amounts of data they process internally, but they want to move to a cloud solution for various reasons (scalability, cut costs etc.). For them, the biggest issue is the data transfer to the cloud, which can take years to accomplish. Cloud providers might provide special programs for such situations, I’m still looking for official details from the major players.

Some time ago, I was talking about on-premises cloud computing. I still believe that Microsoft, as well as other cloud providers, will get into this market this year. For the ones looking for an on-premises alternative now, here are a few on-premises cloud computing offerings.As a disclaimer - we didn’t test any of the solutions presented bellow.

Enomaly

Enomaly’s Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) is a programmable virtual cloud infrastructure for businesses who are looking to design, deploy and manage virtual applications in the cloud and in the process significantly reduce administrative and systems workload. ECP platform works alongside your current virtual data center, providing additional value and cost savings. Feature highlights:

ECP Dashboard with textual audit of all operations happening in the cloud, machine command and control operations, VM repository operations
Provision groups of virtual machines and assign to custom clusters or hosts
Download and provision from a library of pre-existing virtual machine images
Upload ISO or XVM2 images and install unmodified and original operating system images such as Red Hat Enterprise or Microsoft Windows
Provides access at an individual or group level to specific hosts and virtual machines through the ECP security interface

See more details here.

Nimbus

Nimbus is an open source toolkit that allows you to turn your cluster into an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud. Feature highlights:

Two sets of Web Service interfaces: Amazon EC2 WSDLs and Grid community WSRF, read more about interfaces…
Implementation based on the Xen hypervisor (KVM coming soon), read more about supported virtualization technologies…
Can be configured to use familiar schedulers like PBS or SGE to schedule virtual machines, read more about the workspace pilot…
Launches self-configuring virtual clusters with one click, read more about the context broker…
Defines an extensible architecture that allows you to customize the software to the needs of your project

See more details here.

Eucalyptus

This is my favorite.

Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems - is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing “cloud computing” on clusters. The current interface to Eucalyptus is compatible with Amazon’s EC2 interface, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. Eucalyptus is implemented using commonly available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies making it easy to install and maintain. Feature highlights:

Interface compatibility with EC2 (both Web service and Query interfaces)
Simple installation and deployment using Rocks cluster-management tools
Stand-alone RPMs for non-Rocks RPM based systems
Secure internal communication using SOAP with WS-security
Overlay functionality requiring no modification to the target Linux environment
Basic “Cloud Administrator” tools for system management and user accounting
The ability to configure multiple clusters, each with private internal network addresses, into a single Cloud.

See more details here.

If you know about other solutions, please feel free to post them in comments bellow.

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