Use This One Weird Trick to Build Your Own Private Cloud

Once upon a time, the corporate world was run by mainframes. But mainframes weren't perfect for everyone's needs, so along came servers and client/server technology. People proclaimed the death of mainframes, and soon the corporate world was run by servers. But servers weren't perfect for everyone's needs, so along came virtualization technology, and people proclaimed the death of servers.

Of course, servers were needed to run virtualization, but don't worry about that right now.

Soon the corporate world was run by virtualization. But virtualization wasn't perfect, and soon we had a new shiny object - cloud service providers. People proclaimed the death of the data center, despite the cloud being a data center itself. And soon these cloud providers started offering things like containers, and microservices, and more people shouted about how data centers were dying.

Of course, microservices, containers, virtualization, etc., all run on servers, as does the cloud. So, servers never died, and never will. Neither did mainframes, and they are likely to stick around forever.

And data centers aren't going anywhere, either.

If you were pressed to provide a guess as to the percentage of enterprises using only public cloud for their infrastructure, what would you guess? Depending on who you ask, you get very different answers. For example, a developer in Silicon Valley is likely to tell you 100% of companies are using GCP or AWS, and no one uses Azure.

But here is the reality of the situation today:

That's a lot of private clouds still up and running. And many of them will continue to run, just like mainframes still exist. I can give you four good reasons why companies don't go "all-in" on cloud.

First, there is security concerns, some of which may be regulatory. Second, is data sovereignty. Not every company is allowed, by law, to let their data leave a defined territory. Third is overall performance. Anyone who has done a lift-and-shift to the cloud knows that performance may not be ideal when done. Lastly, is the cost of repatriation, on top of the initial migration costs, should it be necessary to bring data and services back in-house.

All of those reasons (and more) are why private clouds continue to exist, and always will. But the problem with private clouds is this: they are hard to build for yourself! The ability to deploy, scale, manage, consume are huge challenges, especially for legacy approaches.

Most "private clouds" are just deploying virtualization. But virtualization isn't perfect for everyone's needs, so along came SoftIron and their HybridCloud product offering.

SoftIron HybridCloud is your own private datacenter in a box. And by "box" I mean rack units, at least 8 RUs (three interconnect control planes, two compute, and three storage). And these units are plug and play, you simply install into the rack, wait ten minutes, and the new unit is recognized, configured, and essentially assimilated into the HybridCloud platform. No extra configuration is needed. And one SoftIron customer has an implementation of 16PB, so it would appear the HybridCloud solution scales fairly well. Oh, and HybridCloud is compatible with Azure and AWS, which makes their solution "hybrid-multi-cloud", which is fairly unique.

In a world looking to migrate away from the Broadcom/VMware licensing nightmare, SoftIron HybridCloud seems to be a viable option.