Pricing out cloud computing? Look at your workloads first
March 7, 2013
Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.
Let’s face it: it’s not easy to figure out the various costs aspects of cloud. Obviously, there are the low monthly charges that are appealing, or savings from consolidation. But for companies with well-run IT operations, the benefits of moving to cloud may be negligible. In calculating cloud financials, too many organizations "overlook or underestimate cloud’s true, core costs at the enterprise workload level," states a new report from Saugatuck Technology.
First, a well-run IT environment may not see much in the way of savings. Organizations that already have highly optimized IT environments should not assume that a move to cloud will deliver significant infrastructure savings, the report, authored by Saugatuck analysts Charles Burns and Bruce Guptill, cautions. "On an optimized in-house infrastructure, costs for running a workload in a public cloud could actually be greater than the costs for running the workload in-house."…
Burns and Guptill define an “optimized” IT environment as one having a "higher-than-average ratio of servers to operational support staff," as well as "extensive use of virtualization (rather than dedicated hardware) so as to minimize low resource utilization and avoid idle excess capacity)." In addition, optimized IT shops usually have figured out ways to acquire resources — compute capacity, memory, storage — "at an attractive discount below vendor ‘list’ prices." Most IT operations, however, are “average,” which means they are potential candidates for cloud computing. But the value seen depends on the types of workloads that are sent to the cloud, be it public, private or hybrid…
Read more from the source @ http://www.zdnet.com/pricing-out-cloud-computing-look-at-your-workloads-first-7000012278/