The patterns of success are emerging around the use of private cloud computing within the enterprise, and it's time to begin sharing what's working and what's not working.
Do make sure to leverage SOA. While many look at private clouds as simple virtualised resources, those building successful private clouds are working from the business requirements, to the architecture, and then to the solution. Without good architectural context, you don't know how and when you're successful with your private cloud efforts.
Do consider performance. I've seen many cases where the use of private clouds has killed application performance. In many instances, applications are not designed to live in multitenant and virtualised environments, and many applications need to be re-architected to operate effectively.
Do consider security and governance. Security and governance are systemic to the architecture.
Don't preselect private cloud software based on what's popular. There are a few camps out there, the EMC VMware camp and the open source camp (Xen, Eucalyptus, and so on), whose members will use only VMware or open source products, respectively. There's no middle ground as far as these camps are concerned.
Don't call it "elastic scalability." You're only scaling out to the limits of the hardware in the rack, which is typically a handful of servers within most enterprises.
Don't let the vendor drive your solution. Not that many private clouds exist, so it's tempting to ask your vendor, including those from "big software," to come in and build your private cloud for you, from the architecture to the solution. If you do that, don't be surprised that everything the vendor sells not only fits in their proposed solution but is required by it.
The vendor has a conflict of interest, so leaving the decision in its hands usually results in a solution that fits its sales needs, not your business needs.
Naturally dataplex can provide strategic and technical advisory services to help you establish your cloud requirements and how they match up with the business requirements.