Free Book: Private Clouds: Selecting the Right Hardware for a Scalable Virtual Infrastructure

I’m in the middle of constructing a new book for Realtime Publishers titled Private Clouds: Selecting the Right Hardware for a Scalable Virtual Infrastructure.  Four chapters long once its complete, I’m giving it away for free at the Realtime Publishers’ website:  http://nexus.realtimepublishers.com/pcsrh.php.

This one’s an interesting new topic for me.  In it I attempt to re-write the conventional wisdom of virtual hardware, focusing people towards the benefits in pre-packaged and pre-engineered virtual hardware.  The concept is a lot like the old “white boxes” of yesteryear.  Back then you at some point realized that building your own servers out of individual pieces and parts was never as good as those you could pick up from a Tier 1 hardware vendor.

This book’s argument is that we’ve essentially come to the same inflection point in virtual hardware today.  Rather then constructing your virtual environment out of individual pieces and parts, it makes more sense to purchase pre-packaged and pre-engineered “modules” of processing, networking, and storage.  Only by abstracting hardware into “units of processing” do we finally embrace the otherwise-confusing concept of Private Clouds.

To me, its turning into quite the interesting read.

Drop on by http://nexus.realtimepublishers.com/pcsrh.php and pick up your free copy.  Chapter 1 is up, with future chapters coming every four weeks or so (following the usual Realtime Publishers model).  Definitely let me know here what you think of the discussion.

Here’s the blurb from the site to whet your appetite even more:

Private clouds are quickly becoming an effective means of stretching infrastructure to meet growing application needs. But the definition of the term "private cloud" can be somewhat elusive. What exactly is meant by "private cloud"? How do you build one? Once you have a private cloud, what is the benefit for the application consumer? And, finally, how can modular hardware make a cloud infrastructure dead simple for even the most complex of enterprise needs. All of these topics are addressed in Private Clouds: Selecting the Right Hardware for a Scalable Virtual Infrastructure.

In it, author Greg Shields reveals how the use of the private cloud enables an enterprise to gain flexibility in application delivery as well as enhanced availability in keeping applications running. You will see first-hand a high-level reference architecture for creating a private cloud, along with a detailed explanation of where the modular hardware approach eliminates risk while reducing complexity. Finally, you'll see the business case for building your own private cloud using modular hardware, proving that today's virtualization infrastructures no longer need to be built from scratch like yesteryear's "white box" servers.

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