Definition

private cloud appliance

A private cloud appliance is a hardware device that provides software-defined converged infrastructure for an organization’s proprietary network.

Private cloud delivers similar advantages to the public cloud, including scalability and self-service, but through a proprietary architecture and for a single organization. Organizations choose to operate their own private clouds for a number of reasons, such as information security concerns or special networking requirements. Private cloud appliances offer a simpler alternative to in-house development of cloud infrastructure from separate elements.

Depending on the requirements of the organization, the appliance may provide converged or hyper-converged infrastructure. Hyper-converged appliances integrate compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources, coordinated through a software-centric architecture, in a single commodity hardware box. Essentially, the difference between the two is that converged infrastructure does not include virtualization software.

Vendors of private cloud appliances include Oracle, Cisco and Nebula.

This was last updated in September 2015

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