When we talk about building an internal private cloud, we're referring in the most pure sense as enabling IT as a Service. This will consist of a unified infrastructure that is provisioned into a pool that business owners can self-provision as business and application needs arise – implying that we need a layer of management to enable automation and orchestration. The solutions can be layered upon well-designed foundations like V-Scape, FlexPod or Vblock.
This of course is the final frontier (for now) and is inspiring the emergence of a plethora of solutions to address delivery of ITaaS. While emergent, the overall market is developed enough to help organizations formalize plans on how ITaaS will start to look for them. As we've discussed, organizations should define the offerings (service catalog) concurrent to building a solid virtual data center foundation. Looking at an orchestration solution can help visualize how the services will be developed and delivered, thus accelerating the organization's journey when it's ready to deploy the solutions.
There are a number of options to consider, which contributes to the immaturity of the overall category. VMware has recently released the second version of its vCloud Director that can enable a private to hybrid to public vCloud strategy for VMware environments. The big four management frameworks have all indicated they will include orchestration, with CA being the most aggressive in partnering with VCE and Imagine Virtually Everything. Cisco has recently acquired Tidal Software and newScale and is busy positioning those products as enabling Cloud Builders. And finally, a rich set of new offerings like DynamicOps, Gale and Cloupia is being validated in FlexPod environments.
Datalink will conduct extensive validation and early customer trials of many of these solutions, and we'll keep you posted on how the solutions are shaping up.