Even as public cloud adoption continues to accelerate, many organizations continue to run critical applications in on-premises data centers. In fact, the long-term future for most organizations is hybrid—according to a recent Forrester study, 60% of infrastructure decision makers would describe their cloud strategy as hybrid. However, gaining visibility into the cost, usage, performance, and security of your on-premises environment can prove a challenging undertaking. You likely have many disparate tools that can give siloed views into performance, or security, and if you’re lucky, cost too. But our customers have been asking for a better approach to hybrid cloud management—one that could unify public cloud, private cloud, and data center management into a single solution. An offering that could help them identify which groups have the highest spending and growth, and reveal opportunities for optimizing spend.
To empower our customers with a comprehensive platform that provides unified visibility across their hybrid environments, our engineers have been plugging away all summer on enhancements to our data center platform.
Data Center Pricing Calculator
Over the 10+ years I’ve spent in IT, one of the biggest challenges I’ve seen infrastructure and operations teams face is understanding data center costs. This includes everything from the facilities (power and cooling and UPSes, oh my!) to the IT infrastructure to staffing to networking costs. I worked on many different excel models over the years trying to come up with an easy way to quantify these costs. The new data center calculator component of CloudHealth makes it easier to track, allocate, and analyze cost data for physical and virtual machines. Pricing can be defined by account, configuration, tags, and other parameters.
In order to meaningfully allocate data center costs to specific departments or teams, you need to have a solid grasp on the cost of running each of your servers. Understanding server costs requires baseline knowledge of pricing models, computing capacity, and usage projections—variables which are constantly in flux as your data center grows.
Server costs are comprised of two components: fixed costs and recurring costs. Fixed costs include physical infrastructure, and perpetual software licenses. Recurring costs include network connectivity, power and cooling, as well as maintenance costs for software and hardware. Our Data Center Pricing Calculator makes it simple to compute and assign costs to compute resources and then allocate them to different departments and teams and track them over time.
Enhanced VMware Capabilities
In addition to supporting VMware custom attributes and annotations, we’ve recently added support for vSphere tags. You can use vSphere tags to create dynamic business groups called Perspectives. Perspectives can be applied to any report in the data center, enabling you to do chargeback (or showback) as well as identifying cost savings opportunities.
Direct Cost Comparison with AWS or Azure
To help customers make better-informed migration decisions, CloudHealth Migration Assessments now offer a side-by-side comparison of the cost of continuing to run your on-premises servers or virtual machines in the data center and the cost of running those workloads in the public cloud. That being said, this is an infrastructure-centric view, it doesn’t include application costs, support and labor costs, or the costs of the actual migration. But it can be helpful to get an apples to apples comparison of what it costs to run the infrastructure for a workload on-premises compared to the cloud.
Next Steps
We’re working on continuously enhancing our data center offering—this is just the beginning. Stay tuned for lots of exciting new enhancements coming to our data center offering!
