Definition

dedicated cloud

A dedicated cloud is a single-tenant cloud infrastructure, which essentially acts as an isolated, single-tenant public cloud. Dedicated clouds are set as an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and are made to reduce an organizations downtime and cost while promoting flexibility and performance. Dedicated clouds work especially well for resource-intensive workloads.

Dedicated clouds may appeal to many regulated businesses because the servers each customer uses is isolated. With this isolation, users can have more control and customization options when it comes to features such as bandwidth and storage. Organizations can use a dedicated cloud for developing or extending on-premise applications in the cloud with included management tools, without needing to worry about the scalability of their infrastructure.

An example of a dedicated cloud is VMware’s dedicated cloud option included in VMware vCloud Air (formerly known as vCHS), called Dedicated Cloud. VMware’s Dedicated Cloud is designed for large-scale cloud projects. IT organizations can migrate existing workloads such as testing and development environments to the Dedicate Cloud service, or develop new applications. Other dedicated cloud services include options from Netsource and OVH.

Dedicated cloud features

Features found in dedicated clouds may include:

  • Security provided by the service provider.
  • Existing development tools provided by the service provider.
  • Licensing cost (typically) by month.
  • Ease of access to, or customization of:
    • Compute resources.
    • Storage.
    • Bandwidth.
    • Level of subscription by license.
    • Support levels.

For example, customers of VMware’s Dedicated Cloud can have complete control over CPU resources and memory and reserve storage for specific virtual machines (VMs). Dedicated Cloud can also provide multiple gateways to the Internet, which allows each virtual data center created to have its own network and firewall configurations.

Dedicated cloud vs private cloud, public cloud and hybrid cloud

Private cloud, public cloud and hybrid clouds are types of cloud architectures which can be easily confused with dedicated clouds.

In a public cloud, a service provider will make resources, such as VMs, applications or storage, available to the public over the internet. While a dedicated cloud is essentially a single-tenant isolated public cloud, a public cloud has a multi-tenant architecture, which enables users to share computing resources.

In a private cloud, a service provider will deliver its services dedicated to the needs of a single organization. Private clouds have similar advantages to a public cloud but through a proprietary architecture.

A hybrid cloud is the combination of private and public clouds, where a private cloud will connect to a public cloud infrastructure. In a hybrid cloud, data and applications are shared between public and private environments.

Dedicated cloud vs a dedicated server 

A dedicated server is a type of remoter server in a network which is dedicated to a single user, organization or application. Unlike dedicated clouds, dedicated servers are entirely controlled by the service provider. Dedicated servers function as on-premise servers do, but are owned and operated by the service provider.

This was last updated in April 2019

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