What's an "Internal Cloud"?

It's a compute cloud, but behind your firewall. It uses your own physical and virtual resources, security model, and compliance/ configuration rules. But it yeilds the same the "elasticity", self-healing and operational efficiencies of a "public" cloud.
White Paper: Active Power Management

Why shouldn't you have the economics and efficiencies of the cloud, minus risks like loss of security, compliance, and control?

Many enterprise IT professionals are hearing the buzz about cloud computing and are intrigued by a number of its attractive attributes. The ability to have applications supported by an infrastructure delivered as an on-demand service offers low-cost operational economics, inherent scalability ("elasticity"), and a new level of reliability through "self-healing" capabilities. That's the good news.

Yet most IT professionals also agree that there are very real concerns about outsourcing even a portion of critical, sensitive internal applications to an external cloud provider. Security, compliance, and lack of control are some of their biggest worries.

Build an "internal cloud"

However, there is another option for IT: build an "internal cloud" within your four walls. What's an "Internal cloud"? It's an architecture that can give you all of the same operational efficiency, elasticity, failure-tolerance and energy-efficiency you see in public, external clouds. To enable this, Cassatt offers policy-based utility computing software, the architectural underpinning of a dynamic, on-demand infrastructure. Cassatt Active Response leverages the hardware, software, and network assets you already own, but manages them so they present the benefits of a cloud computing model to your application owners, while addressing their biggest concerns.

Best of all, Cassatt software:

  • Works with your existing infrastructure including physical Linux, Solaris, AIX, and Windows-based applications (should you choose not to virtualize)
  • Works with existing virtualization technologies from vendors such as VMware, Citrix, and Parallels Virtuozzo containers
  • Doesn't require any software agents or layers which cause re-certification of configurations or architectures
  • Works with network VLAN switches, load balancers, and existing systems management tools such as IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView, and CA-Unicenter
  • Won't disrupt your existing compliance or configuration management tools

More on internal clouds and cloud computing

Here is some additional information on these topics that might be useful:

Ideal if you are a Managed Service Provider, too:

Cassatt Active Response can help you transform your existing hosting business, and get you on the track to providing public cloud-based infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. With a Cassatt utility computing foundation in place, you can focus on offering new services, growing your revenue base, and increasing margins on existing services.

More information: