For all the hundreds of millions of dollars being invested in the cloud industry, it’s more worthwhile to think about the billions that aren’t being spent yet – and why. Two major concerns are holding many companies and organizations back from committing to the cloud.
With the public cloud, we have the stigma of security, or perceived control. Even the best of cloud-based companies cannot deny that their customers ask them about security, they write white papers about it, and some organizations do not feel comfortable enough to fully embrace it.
Then there is the private cloud. Security is less of a concern because it is in the decision-maker’s control. However, the private cloud is very costly. Some industry leaders writing on the cloud have said current models do not meet the economies of scale that the public cloud can, and thus the ROI is tough measure. Nonetheless, there are adopters of private clouds as well.
Public vs. private can be phrased several different ways: metered cost vs. depreciated scale, security vs. documented risk, etc. With all the investment and discussion in the cloud, it’s time to resolve these questions.
I am an IT Architect by trade.When I need to marry a technical solution to an issue that has certain business goals, drivers, stakeholders and constraints, I often have to turn the model upside down to find the answer. So let’s do that here for a moment. Thinking of the cloud and how it works, I typically have any number of devices, whether mobile or desktop or other, connecting to this auto-scaling, behind-the-scenes, service-based model. Typically a cloud is a set of machines hosted in a data center, regardless if they are private to my organization or hosted elsewhere. So if that is the case, are my assumptions holding the solution back? If a private cloud for many organizations is the platform of choice with regard to security, yet it is constrained by financial investment to its limit of scale, how can I remove that or at least alleviate it?
To turn the model upside down …
Instead of devices or desktops connecting to a cloud, what if the cloud lived on the desktops? What if I could take advantage of allocated hardware that is already within an organization to create a private cloud? Now there’s a thought.
Think of an organization with hundreds or thousands of desktops. If there was a way to configure these desktops to allocate and pool their resources to fuel the private cloud, we would eliminate many security concerns and much of the cost.
That is Syneuros. Syneuros is an Open Source project that will configure a desktop computer to lend power to a private cloud. As it is open source and patent-pending, I will share with you here how it is done. First, you can either virtualize an existing Windows (or chosen OS) partition, then back it up and lift it off. Install a very light version of Linux, a hypervisor, and configure the desktop in a way to auto-boot the machine from power on to bring the newly virtualized instance to the screen for the user to use. In the background, we can run another guest OS and/or allocate memory on the machine controlled by a cloud manager to lend power to a private cloud. Thinking of “economies of scale,” we can deploy applications in controlled virtual instances across hundreds of machines, all taking very load-balanced small requests to serve their purpose. This takes high availability and desktop management to a whole new level.
Does this Turn the Cloud Upside Down? I think so.
Quote me here when I say that there will be negative PR to this model if it gains popularity. All the investment that has gone into the cloud has been focusing on the data center, and now this goes contrary to that. Or so it would seem at first. But I say this model opens up a whole new area of the market that is largely untapped: Those who would not consider the public cloud because of security concerns, and would not consider the private cloud because of its cost . The Syneuros model can now be an addition to a hybrid model, which now brings in a market of organizations that would be willing to look at cloud computing.
Discussions, thoughts, comments, questions – I welcome a healthy debate – let’s turn the Cloud Upside Down together!
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