Hosted Private Clouds have become a popular option for users that want to consume OpenStack cloud infrastructure without the responsibility for designing, deploying or operating it. In response to this trend, the OpenStack® Foundation today expanded its popular OpenStack Marketplace vendor comparison site with a new Hosted Private Cloud category.
One of the biggest advantages for OpenStack users is that there are many ways to consume the software, whether on-premise, in a service provider’s data centre or as a hybrid model. The OpenStack Marketplace was launched in May to give OpenStack users an open and transparent means to evaluate the full spectrum of OpenStack deployment options. The new Hosted Private Cloud category joins Training, Consulting Services, Distributions & Appliances, Public Clouds and Drivers, so users can easily find and compare products that best meet their business requirements.
The new Hosted Private Cloud Marketplace category includes detailed information about offerings from Aptira, AURO, Blue Box, IBM, DataCentred, Metacloud, Mirantis, Morphlabs, Rackspace and UnitedStack. All products and services must meet specific technical requirements and be transparent with product information, such as OpenStack versions and capabilities supported.
The number of OpenStack Hosted Private Cloud deployments has grown by 2.3x in the past year, based on the most recent OpenStack User Survey. It’s an attractive OpenStack deployment model for several reasons:
· Low barrier to entry with little to no upfront capital expenditure
· Deployment speeds that are comparable to public cloud provisioning
· Control over physical infrastructure location, isolated hardware, and policies to meet data sovereignty and security requirements
· Minimal responsibility for operating the physical infrastructure and operational aspects such as cloud software upgrades, driver updates, scale out management, etc.
According to Forrester Research: “...the top reported drivers for cloud adoption among enterprise hardware decision-makers using or planning to use hosted private cloud included lowering total cost of ownership (TCO), improved manageability of resources, on-demand capacity, and improved disaster recovery.” (Forrester Research, Inc., Adoption Profile: Hosted Private Cloud, North America And Europe, Q3 2013, March 2014)
