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Expanding Your Cloud Vocabulary with vPDC (Virtual Private Data Centers)

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August 16, 2010

Expanding Your Cloud Vocabulary with vPDC (Virtual Private Data Centers)

By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor


With all the talk in the telecommunications industry surrounding the “cloud,” explaining what a cloud platform is should be easy: utilizing the Internet to manage and store data.

But now the newest acronym, vPDC, has people scrambling for their dictionaries.

The good news is that the definition is really simple. vPDC is just a short and easy way of saying “virtual private data center.” And the concept of vPDC’s is a basic one – but important nonetheless if you have any involvement in enterprise IT.


After all, even if you haven’t implemented a vPDC within the company yet, you likely will in the future.

Why?

As the cloud continues to gain momentum, it just makes sense to create an enterprise data center that is accessible off-site with no physical set-up in-house. If you are wondering why the virtual private data center should be on your radar, consider the inherent benefits in such a platform. The enterprise can enjoy all the cost savings, provisioning, maintenance and scalability advantages that are available in a hosted model, while also enjoying the privacy, security, reliability and performance of a dedicated high-availability platform. You essentially gain the ability to run your applications and store mission-critical data in the private cloud of your provider, without implementing in-house infrastructure. Your employees and customers can then access this information over the Internet or through a VPN, MPLS, MetroE or other private connection. Even better, you don’t have to build an on-premise data center with top level security, worry about hard drive failures or even manage firewalls. To implement a virtual private data center, simply spec out the amount of computing, storage and access needed and then pay by the month. You don’t have the cost of the infrastructure, security, network and hardware ownership and management. Instead, your company can focus on delivering services and applications that users and clients need.

A provider such as Host.net (News - Alert) has already adopted virtualization technology, which delivers cost, HA and DR benefits. You can take advantage of the private and secure virtual server and storage resources on the provider’s network, which dramatically reduces the physical server needs and associated capital outlays. You can often also take advantage of a high-availability environment, remote access, secure portal-based out-of-band management, and managed and monitored network security including firewall, IDPS, web and e-mail security. According to industry analysts, the enterprise data center market is moving in the direction of the vPDC. UK-based BroadGRoup noted that as much as 35 percent of enterprise data center space will be outsourced by 2015. At the same time, as little as 10 percent of applications will remain in private clouds by 2020. This is a 10 percent increase from Forrester’s (News - Alert) prediction one year ago.

A new term for the model has been coined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology: cloud infrastructure as a service.  This is essentially the ability of some service providers to “provision processing, storage, networks and other fundamental computing resources” without requiring the enterprise to manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure.Overall, vPDCs promise to lower the cost and total headaches associated with provisioning and delivering enterprise computing and storage resources. The acronym is one you should definitely add to your vocabulary, right next to VPN, CRM, ERP, B2B, HA, DR and all other shortcuts IT professionals rely on to get the job done.


Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Erin Monda







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