Developing the right prices for the services IT offers as part of a private cloud is one of the most difficult aspects of any “Infrastructure-as-a-Service” (IaaS) initiative. The new VMware IT Business Management Standard Edition offers a quick and easy way to develop a cost model for private cloud services along with the ability to compare these costs to those of public cloud alternatives.
Cost and Infrastructure as a Service
Most IT organizations do a good job keeping track of what they are spending on server, storage, and network resources. They even do a good job tracking people costs. But most IT shops would be hard pressed to tell you the fully burdened cost of any VM supporting any specific application or business unit.
The ability to understand infrastructure costs at this level is fundamental to being successful with IaaS initiatives. If you are going to offer infrastructure services using a solution such as VMware vCloud Automation Center you likely have a strong desire to price your services in a way that takes into account their underlying costs. You may decide to price higher or lower than your costs, depending on what behavior you are trying to drive, but the need to understand cost as a starting point for determining price is undeniable.
Introducing VMware IT Business Management Standard Edition
To help customers address this challenge, today VMware announced a new solution called VMware IT Business Management Standard Edition (ITBM). ITBM Standard allows Enterprise IT to quickly and easily develop an understanding of what their cloud infrastructure is costing – both at the level of the entire infrastructure and also on a per VM basis. Using this solution, within minutes, you can develop an understanding of the cost of your virtual infrastructure. You can understand the cost along multiple dimensions including the cost of a VM for a specific application or business unit. The solution integrates directly with vCloud Automation Center and supports the need to provide rate cards for specific infrastructure services.
How it works
ITBM Standard is a virtual appliance that uses information registered within vCenter Server about the hardware supporting the virtual environment and the configurations for each virtual machine running in the virtual environment. The solution builds a cost model for your infrastructure using an extensive knowledge base that contains the prices from leading hardware vendors along with VMware developed benchmarks for the cost of items such as labor, storage, networking, and facilities. All of the metrics and calculations used to generate the cost model are exposed so that users can easily refine any of the cost drivers based on their own inputs.
Once you have a cost model for your infrastructure you are now in a position to take advantage of one more critical capability of the solution. You can compare your own internal costs to that of offerings available from public cloud providers. Armed with this knowledge you can begin to make smarter decisions around what services you should offer and what services you should source from the cloud.
Learn More
ITBM Standard is part of larger family of offerings that also includes ITBM Advanced and Enterprise Editions. The Advanced Edition gives Enterprise IT the ability to fully cost out the full IT services stack – not just infrastructure – and to manage all of the key processes associated with communicating this information to line-of-business stakeholders. ITBM Enterprise combines Service Level Management (SLM) metrics with the financial metrics associated with services so that IT can manage the cost and quality of services holistically.
To learn more about all of the editions of the VMware IT Business Management Suite visit us online at VMware IT Business Management Suite. To learn more about how using vCloud Automation Center to automate cloud service delivery can save cost while accelerating access to IT applications and resources watch this short vCloud Automation Center Overview video.
