There is a new Forrester Wave report out that focuses on hosted private cloud solutions. Since the last report in Q1 of 2013, a wealth of new cloud service providers have entered the marketplace.
In the 25-criteria evaluation, they identified the 16 most significant providers — AT&T, Blue Box, Canopy, CenturyLink, Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), Datapipe, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Joyent, Orange Business Services, Rackspace, Verizon, Virtustream, VMware, and VooServers — in the category and researched, analyzed, and scored them.
A few key takeaways from the report:
Virtustream and Datapipe lead the pack
Forrester’s research uncovered a market in which Virtustream and Datapipe lead the pack. CSC, HP, Dell, Blue Box, and Joyent follow close behind. CenturyLink, Rackspace, Verizon, AT&T, and Fujitsu offer competitive solutions, while VMware, Canopy, Orange Business Services, and VooServers lag.
A hosted private cloud or a dedicated public cloud environment
The hosted private cloud market contains two categories of vendors: 1) those that see it as a hosted version of a private cloud environment and 2) those that see it more as a dedicated version of a public cloud environment. Building a custom private cloud environment using the expertise of a cloud partner requires a vastly different solution than a highly automated, highly scalable, and standardized service to quickly scale out.
Vendor shortcomings
The hosted private cloud market is still young. Although reporting and network security services help differentiate vendors today, long term, customers will look to hosted private cloud providers to provide hybrid cloud management and fully automated services. Today most vendors allow provisioning of public cloud services through their portal but don’t allow load balancing or movement of workloads.
What is hosted private cloud?
There is a lot of ambiguity in the cloud space, and this is no different for private solutions. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines private cloud as:
“Cloud infrastructure provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization comprising multiple consumers (e.g., business units). It may be owned, managed, and operated by the organization, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on- or off-premises.”
Hosted private cloud refers to a variation of this, where the solution lives off-premise in a hosted environment and assumes some level of dedication to a single organization. Despite the relatively standard definition, there’s a great deal of variation that continues in today’s arena.
If you are exploring this type of deployment, be ready for substantial variability in the following areas:
- Inconsistent management of solution layers
- Inconsistent tenancy of infrastructure components
- Inconsistent nomenclature
- Inconsistent customization
Common platforms that run today’s hosted private clouds:
- OpenStack
- VMware’s vCloud Director
- Apache CloudStack
- OnApp
Hernan Alvarez, Chief Product Officer of Blue Box, had this to say about the report:
“Our debut appearance in the Hosted Private Cloud Forrester Wave report aligned with a period of strong momentum for Blue Box and Blue Box Cloud. We’ve since added new capabilities to the product, new customers, more strategic partners, expanded customer deployments, and a strong Series B funding round. Next up, we’re adding new products targeting the channel and new service geographies. We are excited about how we’ll score in the next Forrester report on hosted private cloud.”
If you are interested in acquiring the complete Forrester report, here is the link.
To fully understand what type of solution is right for your business, contact us to do a complete Infrastructure Assessment.
