With Palo Alto’s latest announcement that I can buy an “Internal Cloud” for only $3,495 per CPU, I figured I’d share my thoughts about the real vs. perceived benefits of this new private compute cloud idea. Is this private cloud thing good for IT? The short answer is, money being no object, and assuming private cloud computing actually delivers something unique, maybe.  The long answer, based on the cards played so far, is no.  SBWH is not a fortune 100 company, and in this economy, we evaluate every cost.  We don’t have thousands of physical servers, and we don’t store 10 billion photos.  If I read the press release correctly, vSphere’s “private cloud” lets me combine, say, thirty-two 16-CPU servers and $1.8 million dollars in Enterprise Plus licensing, along with abundant training for a new tool set, to achieve “the mainframe of the 21st century,” explained David Straede.

More info: Microsoft Case Study