Private or public cloud?

What is the difference anyway?

Public :someone else owns it and you rent space that you share with the other renters

Private: you can own it and or rent it but don't share it with the other renters

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is defined by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology as follows:

“Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable

computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and

released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction .”

Essentially, cloud computing is the provision of IT services that are on-demand and network accessible, using flexible pooled resources

that are simple to deploy and expand, with a low up-front, pay-asyou-go cost model. Cloud computing is typically delivered with

a combination of commodity hardware, virtualization, management.

I'm convinced that not all of our IT infrastructure will end up in the cloud. One of the main advantages of the whole "Cloud" idea is to have

applications and servers share resources. The advantage is that we can build more highly redundant hardware underneath the applications that we rely on.

My father who has been very successful investing in the stock market told me that when you see everyone jumping in that is when you should be thinking about jumping out. Thats not exactly how I feel about the cloud but it makes me think. What are the cloud providers not telling us? What have we not discovered or experienced that would make us more cautious? or make us ask better questions? Thats why I feel there is a lot of merit to the products we see coming out like the new HP servers. They are scalable and make the appropriate use of Memory, Processor, Disc, Power and cooling. The other important part. You can own your cloud.

both solutions have merit for the different types of customers out there. Right now I'm just trying to make sure I've got a handle on what all the options really are.  I'm pulling back a bit as I see more products coming to the market.

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/DS_00168/DS_00168.pdf