IT departments are increasingly looking towards private cloud computing, according to a survey of delegates at the recent International Supercomputing Conference.
The survey, carried out by Platform Computing, showed that 28 per cent were planning to deploy private cloud in 2009, with the demand driven by the increased workload demand of applications and the need for IT to cut costs at the same time.
Cloud computing is an IT delivery model that provides infrastructure and computer resources as a service. By implementing a private cloud, IT uses the power of sharing to maximise the utilisation of compute, networking and storage resources in an organisation. The compute-intensive nature of HPC applications lends themselves to the benefits of shared resource pools of private clouds. The concept of cloud computing has generated considerable buzz in recent months and is expected to become increasingly popular over the next few years. According to Gartner, by 2012 80 pe rcent of Fortune 1000 enterprises will be paying for some cloud computing services and 30 per cent will be paying for cloud computing infrastructure services.
Most surveyed (41 per cent) cited 'improving efficiency' as the biggest motivation for establishing a private cloud. This was followed by 'resource scalability' (18 per cent), 'cutting costs' (17 per cent), 'experimenting with cloud computing' (15 per cent) and 'improving IT responsiveness' (9 per cent).
