A major plus point in relation to private cloud architecture is that there is resource pooling, which is flexible enough to allow for a quick change to match the demands of the business. These pools of resources adapt to shifting demands of current services so that new ones may be deployed as quickly as possible. In order to maintain their performance, they have to be able to withstand peak periods, resulting in periods with cycles that are idle.

Traditional IT environments provide two good examples being email and back up. Emails will have their peak time at the beginning of the workday while being constant and lessening at the days’ end or lunch. There are back up systems that handle the heavier work at night times to ensure that any performance hits are avoided. Private cloud environments and cloud server hosting allow for such applications to share physical resources, increasing the utilization of hardware and decreasing cycles, which are idle. Although these positive points have been noted, idle cycles ill persist and regularly so in many cases based on the time of year, month or day. So, what should be done with these cycles is the question to ask.

Power management is one of the schools of thought which mentions that where resources aren’t being made use of, they should not have to be paid to power them. This may be automated as processors lessen power usage, and server components may cap. With the software of virtualization, however, it is made possible to consolidate workloads across resources during downtimes and lessen power usage. Although this is possible and saves power, there is a further problem.

Hardware depreciates whether powered or not and is surpassed, being outdated when it is set up. Furthermore, with hardware aging, its MTBF rises. Although powering down saves funds, the hardware wastes away and does not provide value. Bearing this under consideration, another thought process is finding other uses for the hardware in question while an idle period is being experienced. The resources can instead be used for other tasks, which may require more resources and could not be completed without them. This may occur physically or virtually, depending on the platform of hardware of software. An example of one such use would be Hadoop. The software is designed to process big data for maximum speeds and less expense. To make this occur, Hadoop spreads the data and processing across many nodes, upward of 6.000. Data is fed into the cluster of Hadoop and functions of processing run on the sets of data.

Making use of a small number of specialized resources, such as job tracker and name nodes along with slave nodes, which are idle resources that may be added to the cluster. These allow for efficient processing of web traffic data and more. The case described would be used where there are seasonal peaks in environments because of data redistribution across the cluster of nodes that are removed and added. Fine-tuning would be needed to streamline for the architecture. However, with the correct sets of data and resources, such data would be processed and not neglected. Although Hadoop is an example of running CPU cycles on private clouds for enterprises, there are many more in existence. Private clouds have to provide your IT department with more time to work on initiatives of strategy as opposed to tactical work, allowing them to streamline the work process and support the business and its customers.