Virtual Private cloud: SLA alternatives

As the public cloud SLA receives an analyst attack, some companies believe that a virtual private cloud can provide the right combination of cloud agility and service reliability management.

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) provides an on-demand infrastructure that is a service (IaaS) outside the customer data center, but runs on a dedicated infrastructure rather than a multi-tenant infrastructure. Use a virtual private network (VPN) or other network connection to connect every customer, not the public Internet.

Similarly, a virtual private cloud can provide a higher level of service agreement (SLA) than the public cloud, in some cases committing to 100% of the runtime.

Find the right SLA

Some purists may consider this kind of management hosting is not cloud computing, but these distinctions have nothing to do with customers, such as Taylor Erickson, the IT vice President of Lanx Inc., which specializes in spinal health and surgical products.

Last fall, Lanx moved its SAP applications and Active Directory to a Virtustream hosted virtual private cloud. Virtustream's XStream Virtual Private cloud provides the company with five Nine (99.999%) runtime SLAs. The fines are calculated from 99.949%, and these are lanx in the analysis of the company's assistance to reopen the contract, Erickson said.

The virtual private cloud SLA was the only reason the company chose Virtustream when Virtustream xstream VPC and a public cloud provider who declined to be named.

In fact, enterprise management hosting providers, such as ViaWest and hosting.com, tend to be 100% run-time SLAs, but Virtustream demonstrates the professionalism of the SAP hosting required by Lanx, and from the cost of Virtustream, is half as low as other services.

The 99.999% uptime is still much higher than the company itself. For example, one week after the company moved, an air-conditioning unit in the Lanx building went wrong and the server space temperature soared to 98 degrees. "But our core key sap is still running because we have migrated it to the cloud provider," Erickson said.

Public cloud and private cloud compromise: virtual Private cloud

Other users say the public cloud tends to have the lowest cost and most of the flexibility of all types of services is undeniable, but using the public cloud requires very serious planning.

"You can't never talk about the public cloud," said Dave Robbins, a senior VP and CIO at Ellie Mae, a manufacturer of electronic loan origination platforms, "but if you're doing it, what's your architecture and strategy?" ”

Robbins says the cost of simply creating a public cloud IaaS field, not respecting regional diversity, or getting an appropriate ecosystem to develop application delivery is very low, but also very low in value.

"It's more complicated than people think," he said. "You have to look at the whole structure." ”

Meanwhile, Ellie Mae found a good compromise in Tier 3, the virtual private cloud, which connects the local flexpod environment that uses Cloupia, now owned by Cisco.

Tier 3 Infrastructure Space The company started using it last year, mainly migrating old infrastructure to new Flexpods, while releasing new products and services. As the process takes place some production applications run in Tier 3, and the company uses Tier 3 VPC for QA and test systems.

VPC Bridge public Cloud SLAs and business expectations

Some of the SLAs are mysterious, but the bigger problem is the disconnect between the expectations of the typical enterprise customer and the hosting provider and the management service provider, and the difference between what they really want from the public cloud, says James Staten, a Forrester Analytics analyst.

"We're all used to pushing a custodian to get what we want, we got it, but they're just customizing the environment for us and signing a three-year agreement with us," he said. Clients seeking public cloud services do not want to be locked up by such protocols, and in some cases it is preferable to use standardized services, Staten said. But in other cases, the SLA will be lower.