Our good friends over at Redmondmag.com have an interesting in-depth article on “Building a Private Cloud.” This article is written by what we would call a “super-techie”; Eric Beehler has more certifications and random letter combinations after his name than your average technical guru – this guy knows of what he speaks.

Eric’s article asks the question – “How does an IT manager approach the cloud for infrastructure and applications?” A great question.

Some of the concerns/opportunities identified for IT mangers deploying private clouds include:

• Cloud solutions must either extend internal infrastructure to an environment where IT professionals don’t have traditional management capabilities or move the cloud to an internal infrastructure
• Cloud computing must be nimble and real-time using the technology that an organization already has
• Companies must be able to build a private cloud and save money by increasing utilization, again, by using the computers they already own
• IT departments must be able to move resources to where they are need quickly and seamlessly
• Latency – the great equalizer; IT departments must be able to ensure that private cloud access is over a wide area network through a VPN at a branch office is the same speed as the local data center

So, how does an IT department manage all of this? We believe that WAN optimization has to be included in order for private clouds to succeed. Some of the benefits that WAN optimization brings to private clouds include:

• Acceleration – reduces private cloud application response times over the WAN
• Virtualization – enables platform sharing (use of existing resources) between acceleration and other applications
• Management – provides centralized management, control, and provisioning across the WAN environment
• Scalability – allows IT to scale existing resources across workloads and the WAN.

What other things keep you up at night when considering a private cloud deployment? Would you consider a private cloud deployment without WAN optimization?