Data Center Migration Assessment Made Easy

Cloud migration1 is generally defined as the process of moving data, applications or other business elements from an organization’s on-premise environment to the public cloud. Organizations migrate their resources to save money, add more flexibility or to be more secure.

One of the first steps in cloud migration is to get an assessment or a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis of moving right resources to the cloud. This preliminary assessment provides an overall cost of moving your identified resources to the public cloud.  This assessment provides cost insights to move to AWS or Azure and can take into account on-demand costs as well as cost savings via Reservations. The TCO is generally an easier way to get budget approvals for resource migration and provides companies an understanding of the cost involved when moving to the public cloud.   

The next step then involves understanding the cost of moving each application. This can be done via interdependencies or by ensuring servers that are part of an application are appropriately tagged. Once these servers are grouped, running another assessment highlights the TCO for migrating that application.

At CloudHealth we are streamlining the process of running assessment for each step of migrating from on-premise to the public cloud. These assessments can be done based on configurations i.e. a 1:1 match on CPU, memory and disk configuration or based on performance metrics collected over a period of time. Running assessments based on performance metrics also provides an opportunity to rightsize to the public cloud and not having to over-provision. A quick recap that public cloud is based on an OpEx model vs on-premise which is CapEx. So, over-provisioning on the public cloud is equivalent of spending more than necessary.

Some of the revamped features include:

• Viewing AWS and Azure migration assessments side-by-side along with current on-premise costs which can be entered via our DataCenter pricing calculator.

• Providing flexibility for cyclic applications to choose time period of evaluations. Current options range from 7 days,30 days and 60 days (Note: This only applies to Utilization based migration assessments).

• Running Utilization based migration assessment on average or max CPU, memory and disk metrics. Along with the ability to specify an overhead for each metric.

• Assessments for all servers in an account with the ability to deselect accounts. Each account also provides a rolled up view of total cost.
• Filtering via Tags, perspectives or even server name.

• An executive summary view of the migration assessment that shows the on-premise footprint i.e. total cores, memory and disk consumption and compares it to running on public cloud.

We continue to provide details on the ideal EC2 instances in AWS and Virtual Machines in Azure that are best suited for the on-premise servers being migrated.