The cloud gold rush

Build your own cloud

The definition of 'cloud computing' has been pulled in several directions and its existence questioned.

Now the term 'private cloud' is going through the same treatment. Brennan IT has been marketing its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) as a private cloud for the year since it was launched and is transitioning its customers on hosted hardware to virtual machines in its IaaS platform.

The integrator has settled on a definition that is more or less identical to a public cloud such as Amazon's internet services, but with several crucial differences.

"The public cloud is on-demand, elastic compute, which is all flexible. In a private cloud it is all those things but added to it is customer control and service provider control. You have a different type of reliability backed by SLAs rather than best effort, a different level of security because it sits behind the company firewall," says McMenemy.

McMenemy admits that when it comes to scale, Amazon would have far higher-spec hardware in its massive data centres to promise near 100 percent reliability.

However, Brennan can still offer a common pool of networked resources that can be discretely allocated and billed on a per user basis. Brennan IT also provides private IP connections to its data centres through its ISP arm, which means it can guarantee service rather than relying on the open internet as Amazon's customers do.

"Cloud computing only works if the network works. Do I think the Amazon cloud might go down? No. Do I think there could be issues in the connection to Amazon? Yeah, there could be," says McMenemy.Australian integrators such as a Brennan have a key advantage over the Rackspaces and Amazons in that they can store data in Australia rather than Singapore, the Asia Pacific's IT hub.

They can also offer SLAs for the network, applications and the platform itself. Integrators that build private clouds can offer higher levels of security for customers' data - or provide a "trusted cloud", as global integrator CSC likes to put it.

"All that Bob Hayward stuff [Hayward is CTO of CSC] I'm getting a bit bored of because he hasn't launched a bloody service," says McMenemy.

Brennan has customers using its private cloud for production and a public cloud for test and development. Interaction between the two clouds is possible with the right security policies.

Brennan operates a small channel; "tens" of resellers either take a commission or rebadge the IaaS platform as their own. Some independent software vendors are using IaaS to launch SaaS products in short timeframes.

McMenemy refuses to give numbers for virtual machines, total storage or data centre capacity. The company bought "a few million dollars" worth of hardware from the VCE alliance (VMware, Cisco and EMC) on which the IaaS platform runs. This latest investment tripled the size of hardware installed nine months ago.

The integrator's next step is to build a data centre in Melbourne where it is using another hosting company to store customer data.