Taking a staged approach to building a private cloud helps ensure

success along the way. Here's how to break it down.

If you're considering building a private cloud, there are five steps you
should take: standardization, consolidation, virtualization, automation and
orchestration. Taking such a multistage approach will greatly improve your
chances of success and help you spot strengths and weaknesses in your
system as you move toward your private cloud goal.

Standardization: Standardization is truly the foundation when it comes to

building a private cloud, setting you up for success in each subsequent
step. During the standardization phase, you'll want to decide which
hardware and software components you'll use for the private cloud
deployment.

Simplify your environment as much as possible--the more disparate your

systems, the more complexity and cost you'll incur as you build your
private cloud. This is especially true during the automation and
orchestration phases, in which custom integration of many systems
becomes costly and time consuming. It would be difficult to justify more
than one vendor's products in your data center, for example--if you're an
EMC shop or a NetApp shop, then be just that and avoid one-offs from
other vendors. One way to make the justification process work is to avoid
the trap of considering only the capital cost of a system--look at the total
cost of ownership, including the operating costs of managing multiple
systems.

A common standardization practice is to build out infrastructure in a pod

design. This allows a cookie-cutter approach to scale and results in a very
predictable cost model. In this approach, a pod of network, compute and
storage with a specific capacity is designed or procured as such. This
allows standardization not only for individual components, but also for
cabling, rack layout, connectivity and more.

Consolidation: Once you know the systems you'll use to build a private
cloud, it's time to consolidate. This is nothing new as the industry has been
consolidating servers and storage for years. This phase is about limiting
the amount of equipment that will be managed. Replace outdated low-
performing equipment with systems that can scale to your needs. For
example, if your design requires multiple storage protocols, look for
systems that can meet your needs with a single device.
Virtualization: Whether you virtualize will depend on both your design and
intended delivery model. Most models will require virtualization, but not all.
For example, a pure PaaS model (not as common for private cloud) does
not necessarily require server virtualization because the platform itself may
handle allocation of underlying resources. Network virtualization
techniques such as SDN may also be used to provide additional flexibility
to network resources.

Don't ignore your standardization during this phase; you'll again want to
keep TCO in mind and not be fooled by oversimplified capex arguments.

Automation: So far, you've been mostly concerned about choosing the

right systems; automation is the first step in modifying your IT processes.
The goal is simple: Change common repetitive manual tasks to automated
ones. Automation is the key to freeing up IT staff for more important tasks,
such as service deployment. The automation tool set you choose will have
a lot to do with the underlying consolidation and standardization decisions
made. Not all products will work, or work well, with all hardware.
This is where the benefits of standardization will really shine through. The
more standardized the environment, the fewer custom integration points
will be required. In some cases, standardization choices can eliminate
custom integration points all together. For example standardizing on
Vblock, the unified server, storage and networking system created by a
joint venture of EMC, Cisco and VMware, comes with Unified Infrastructure
Manager, which is already customized to automate the underlying
components. Other systems based on standards like CloudStack or
OpenStack will also have unified management products.
Orchestration: This is the last stage of the process, and provides the
"self-service" functionality of a private cloud architecture. There are two
key components you'll want from your orchestration product or suite: a
service catalog and a self-service portal. The product you choose should
also includetrackback/chargeback functionality.

Most orchestration systems are actually a suite of software rather than

single product. Many times these separate components came as a result
of the vendor's acquisitions or were developed by separate internal
business units, and only recently are they working together as an
orchestration system. This can lead to integration pains within the
orchestration software itself. Assess the integration and maturity of the
software before you write your purchase order.

Hardware and software are just part of the process of building a private
cloud--many would argue that they're the easy part. Using a staged
approach as outlined here should help them remain that way. As you build
out a plan and continue down the path, don't forget that people and
processare a big part of the deployment.