AWS re:Invent kicked off December 3rd in Las Vegas and Andy Jassy’s keynote included a not too subtle reminder:
97% of infrastructure spending is still on-premises. Naturally, AWS wants the on-prem number to be big because it indicates there is still a lot of growth left for cloud services. Regardless, it’s a good reminder that decades of investments in data center infrastructure, staff, facilities, processes, etc. aren’t going away overnight. Enterprises still have a lot of on-premise infrastructure to manage, but they’re taking some of the best practices for cloud management—specifically cost management and optimization—and applying them to their data center.
When CloudHealth introduced CloudHealth Hybrid, the new support for VMware Cloud on AWS got most of the attention. Just as important, however, was the addition of enhanced cost benchmark data and customizable cost drivers. CloudHealth Hybrid reports on all data center costs, including power and cooling, based on a customer’s specific cost drivers and industry benchmarks. Customers can compare their costs to industry benchmarks and have the flexibility to override benchmark pricing for all cost drivers and customize for their specific environment.
To give you an accurate view of your hybrid cloud costs, CloudHealth maintains a reference database, capturing and updating data on over 10,000 server configurations across multiple vendors and cataloging approximately 7 years of server configuration data. These benchmark costs include over 600 customer reference data points. CloudHealth provides benchmark pricing for a host of cost drivers including server hardware, storage, software licenses, maintenance costs, labor, network, facilities, and additional costs.
If you don’t accurately track your overall data center costs, you can use CloudHealth Hybrid’s benchmark data to make more informed cloud migration assessments. If you do have actual data center costs, you can compare that cost data to industry benchmarks. CloudHealth Hybrid also lets you edit and customize benchmark pricing in the platform. You can also add additional pricing that is not captured by one of the cost drivers.
Once you’ve added your own costs within cost benchmarks, those costs will be reflected in your CloudHealth Cost History report. CloudHealth Hybrid will also track your cost driver history so you can see how you changed costs over time or revert back to an historical cost.
I’ve written about the evolution of decentralized and centralized IT before. Public cloud services used by a diverse user base (decentralized IT) require different management capabilities than the centralized IT model of enterprise data centers. But we’re in an increasingly hybrid world and, with only 3% of infrastructure spend in the cloud, we’ll remain so for the foreseeable future. CloudHealth and VMware offer complementary solutions for both: the VMware vRealize Operations (vROPS) for managing on-premises data center, private, and hybrid cloud; CloudHealth for managing public, multi, and hybrid clouds. Yes, both solutions have hybrid capabilities, but they are used by different roles within a company and for different purposes.
vROPS is used by VI and systems administrators to drive efficient operations (i.e., provisioning, troubleshooting, automation) in the private and hybrid clouds. CloudHealth is a platform used by cloud admins, engineering teams, financial and business analysts, and line of business leaders to drive improved business outcomes (i.e., governance, optimization, visibility) in the public and hybrid clouds.
With CloudHealth Hybrid, the value is incorporating VMware vSphere and VMware Cloud on AWS into CloudHealth’s multicloud reporting and optimization. This lets multiple users across an organization see the entire cloud ecosystem in one place, manage costs, and optimize and govern usage. With the vROPS Management Pack for CloudHealth, VI and systems administrators can incorporate public cloud costs so they can view data center, hybrid cloud and public cloud costs within vROPS.
The new support for VMware Cloud on AWS is certainly the highlight of CloudHealth Hybrid. But not to be overlooked is the enhancements CloudHealth has made to data center cost benchmarks. As Andy Jassy mentioned, there is still a lot of infrastructure spend on-premises. Managing that spend will be critical, even as companies move more and more workloads to the public clouds. The enhanced cost benchmarks in CloudHealth Hybrid give customers with hybrid and public clouds the ability to accurately assess infrastructure spend from their data center to the public clouds and make the best, most informed decisions for workload placement and cloud migrations.
