Dedicated Private Cloud vs. Virtual Private Cloud: What’s the Difference?

What is the difference between a dedicated private cloud and a virtual private cloud? As solutions architects, this is a question my teammates and I hear often. Simply put:

• Dedicated Private Cloud (DPC) is defined as a physically isolated, single-tenant collection of compute, network, and sometimes storage resources exclusively provisioned to just one organization or application.
• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is defined as a multi-tenant but virtually isolated, collection of compute, network, and storage resources.

A simple analogy comparing the two would be choosing between a single-family private home (DPC) versus a condo building (VPC).

Despite the differences, both dedicated and virtual private clouds offer secure environments with flexible management options, which allow you to concentrate on your core business instead of struggling to keep up with daily infrastructure monitoring and maintenance.

Let’s discuss each cloud product in greater depth and review use cases for dedicated vs. virtual private clouds. I’ll use HorizonIQ’s dedicated private cloud (DPC) and virtual private cloud (VPC) products as examples for the DPC and VPC differentiators.

What is a Dedicated Private Cloud (DPC)?

DPCs are scalable, isolated computing environments that are tailored to fit unique requirements and rightsized for any workload or application. DPCs are ideal for mission-critical or legacy applications. When applications can’t be easily refactored for the cloud, a DPC can be a viable solution. DPC is also ideal for organizations seeking to reduce time spent maintaining infrastructure. You do not need to sacrifice control, compliance, or performance with a DPC. HorizonIQ DPCs are built with trusted enterprise-class technologies powered by VMware or Hyper-V.

DPC use cases:

• Compliance and audit requirements, such as PCI or HIPAA
• Stringent security requirements
• Large scale applications with rigorous performance and/or data storage requirements
• Legacy applications, which may require hardware keys or specific software licensing components
• Data center migration — scale physical compute, network, and storage capacity as needed without significant investments in data center build outs
• Complex network requirements, which may include MPLS, SDWAN, private layer 2 connections to customers, vendors or partners
• Fully integrated active or hot-standby disaster recovery environments
• Infrastructure Management Services, all the way to the operating system
• High CPU/GPU/RAM requirements
• AI environments
• Big Data
• Always on applications that are not fit for hyper-scale providers

HorizonIQ’s DPC differentiators:

• Designed and “right-sized” to fit your application, economics and compliance requirements
• Built with enterprise-class technologies and powered by VMware or Hyper-V.
• Utilize 100 percent isolated compute and highly secure, single-tenant environments perfect for PCI or HIPAA compliance.
• Flexible compute and data storage options that allow you to meet any application performance and growth requirements.
• OS Managed services free up time from routine tasks of patching
• Transparency into the core infrastructure technology allows you complete visibility in the inter-workings of the environment.
• No restrictions on sizing of the VMs or application workloads because the infrastructure is custom designed for your organization’s specific technology needs.
• SDN switching for flexible, quick, and easy network management or dedicated switching for complex network configurations to meet any network requirements.
• MDR security services available, which include vulnerability scanning, IDS/IPS, log management with SOC (Security Operations Center)
• Off-site cloud backups and fully integrated and managed DRaaS available.

What is a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)?

VPCs are ideal for applications with variable resource requirements and organizations seeking to reduce time spent maintaining infrastructure without sacrificing control of your virtual machines, compliance, and elasticity. They provide a customized landscape of users, groups, computing resources and a virtual network that you define. Different organizations or users of VPC resources do not have access to the underlying hypervisor for customization or monitoring plugin installation.

VPCs are pre-designed for smaller to medium workloads and provide management and monitoring tools. They allow for fast application deployment because the highly available compute, security, storage, and hypervisors are already deployed and ready for your workload.

VPC use cases:

• Small to medium-sized workloads with 10 to 25 VMs and simple network requirements
• Applications with lower RAM requirements
• Ideal for additional capacity needed for projects. Deploy in hours—not days.
• Quickly spin up unlimited Virtual Machines (VMs) per host to support new projects or peak business cycle’s ability to quickly add resources on demand

HorizonIQ’s VPC differentiators:

• Designed for fast deployments enabling you to eliminate lengthy sourcing and procurement timelines
• Shield Managed Security services included
  • 24/7 physical security in SSAE 16/SOC 2 certified Data Centers
  • Private networks & segmentation
  • Account security for secure portal access
  • DDoS protection & Mitigation
• OS Managed services free up time from routine tasks of patching
• Easy to use interface simplifies management and reduces operational expense of training IT staff
• Off-site Cloud Backups and Fully integrated On-Demand (Paygo) DRaaS available
• MDR security services available, which include vulnerability scanning, IDS/IPS, log management with SOC (Security Operations Center)

DPC vs VPC: Which is Right?

Do you know which private cloud model will work with your company’s workload and applications? Whether you’re certain that a DPC or VPC will be a good fit or you’re still unsure, HorizonIQ’s experts can help take your cloud infrastructure to the next level. Chat today to talk all things private cloud.