Building a halfway house to the cloud

Several private clouds are now coming to market based on the Vblock technology developed by VCE, a joint venture forged by Cisco, EMC and VMWare. Last week I groaned inwardly as I saw not one, but two announcements plop into my inbox. First came Sungard’s “fully managed cloud offering”, and then a couple of days later CSC got in touch to brief me about the launch of CSC BizCloud, “the industry’s first on-premise private cloud billed as a service.”

It’s entirely predictable of course that we’ll see a surge of fake cloud roll-outs this year, and I shouldn’t be surprised to find the usual suspects eager to host them. It’s a lucrative business when, as I highlighted last year when quoting a Microsoft white paper, “private clouds are feasible but come with a significant cost premium of about 10 times the cost of a public cloud for the same unit of service.”

Read more of Phil Wainewright’s blog post