I wanted to let everyone know about an interesting acronym created by AT&T's Cloud Guru @JoeWeinman which does a great job of decribing what a private cloud is. (V)irtualized (A)utomated (P)rovisioning (O)f (R)esources or VAPOR. Just add an elastic and I think we may be on to something here. So next time someone asks whether private clouds are real, tell'em they're just Vapor, or if you prefer ElasticVapor.
Weinman has also come up with an interesting acyonmy for CLOUD > (C)ommon, (L)ocation-independent, (O)nline, (U)tility, on-(D)emand; Basically saying Clouds are ubiquitous.
I'd also highly recommend following Weinman's Blog at > Cloudonomics.com