Private clouds gaining popularity for high-performance computing

But business culture and complexity of management still pose challenges, says research

Organisational culture is one of the key obstacles when rolling out private clouds

More than a quarter of IT decision-makers using high-performance computing (HPC) are planning to introduce private clouds, as pressure for cost reduction and application workload demands rise, according to research.

Some 28 per cent of 103 IT executives polled said they are planning to deploy the technology within HPC environments as an attempt to use shared resources to cope with financial and technical pressures.

Two thirds of those surveyed (67 per cent) are planning to run simulation and modelling applications on cloud-style infrastructure to cater for greater power needs for computing-intensive tasks. Some 32 per cent said they were considering web services as a potential area for private cloud use, while 18 per cent cited business analytics.

According to the survey, technology chiefs are becoming more positive about the benefits of cloud computing, with 41 per cent citing efficiency improvements as the key upside. Resource scalability was mentioned by 18 per cent, followed by cutting costs (17 per cent), experimenting with cloud computing (15 per cent) and improving IT responsiveness (nine per cent).

But the knowledge barrier still needs to be overcome. Some 76 per cent of IT executives questioned admitted they do not feel the business understands the potential of private clouds and 37 per cent see organisational culture as the main obstacle in implementing the technology.

Additional hurdles cited by the respondents included complexity of managing the technology (26 per cent), security (21 per cent), upfront costs (eight per cent) and application software licensing (eight per cent).

The survey was carried out by grid specialist Platform Computing.