News

New Tool Compares Private, Public Cloud Costs

• By David Ramel
• 08/26/2016

CloudPhysics announced a new tool that calculates and compares the costs of running enterprise workloads in on-premises virtual machines (VMs) or in a public cloud.

Called the Cost Calculator for Private Cloud with the Public Cloud Comparison, the data-driven tool is only available with the CloudPhysics Premium Edition, which the company says is an "agile, scalable SaaS solution continuously analyzes customer environments and leverages collective intelligence to yield actionable results that optimize performance, lower costs, reduce risk, and enable smarter business decisions." The new cloud cost calculator can be tried out with a 14-day trial, however.

"The Cost Calculator for Private Cloud allows the customer to rightsize VMs by comparing a VM's current resources, such as CPU and storage, with the amount the VM actually requires to perform its functions," the company said in a news release Wednesday. "Because many VMs are overprovisioned with resources, rightsizing helps a customer save costs per workload, whether on-premises or in the cloud. By rightsizing workloads, customers are assured that VM provisioning fits actual usage."

Taking into account selected workloads, hosts, clusters or datacenters, the tool determines costs at a per workload/VM level to determine real-world private cloud costs, which then can be compared with public offerings such as Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), by far the leader in that space. An example comparison in a solution brief illustrated how both AWS and Microsoft Azure could result in savings in certain situations with a sample on-premises implementation.

"The calculator also offers customers the unique ability to conduct 'apples-to-apples' comparison of virtual workloads in a private cloud model, where resources are shared -- versus the public cloud model, where resources are subscribed from a cloud service provider," the company said. "Users can create scenarios that compare their private cloud costs vs. public cloud estimates with utilization levels at Peak, 95th, and 99th percentiles. They can then accurately determine what these workloads cost to operate in the public cloud at those respective levels."

CloudPhysics exec Chris Grossmeier said it solves a longstanding problem.

"If you talk to anyone who sells cloud computing resources, you typically hear the same message: 'The cloud will save you money!'" he said in a blog post yesterday. "But the truth is, it's very hard to know how much money the cloud can save you. Cloud providers often do a good job of telling you how much an instance with a hypothetical workload will cost. However, they often fail to tell you how much your environment will really cost in the cloud, and how you can actually save money."

Interested companies can download the CloudPhysics Free Edition and then request access for a Premium Trial to test the new tool for 14 days.