Posted on Thursday, October 27, 2016 in Private Cloud, Cloud Storage
For years cloud providers have been proudly advertising the cost saving benefits of hosted storage. The benefits are virtually unarguable – reduced capital investment, fewer staff resourcing requirements and “infinite” on-demand scalability – all help to contain the IT budget.
But the Cloud Price Index report from analysts 451 Research might change these long-held beliefs.
Cloud is always cheaper – except when it isn’t
Analysts discovered that public cloud services from VMware and Microsoft were cheaper – under specific circumstances. Total cost of ownership is undeniably lower when on-site engineers manage fewer than 400 virtual machines each.
In every other scenario, private cloud services were more expensive in the long run.
OpenCloud presents additional benefits
For any deployment scenario where your IT engineers are managing an average of more than 400 virtual machines, OpenStack was shown to have a lower TCO. Additional savings were noted when businesses chose an OpenStack infrastructure over a “home-grown” approach to in-house private cloud deployment.
Using an established framework makes installation and management (and therefore cheaper) than any other in-house system.
Not the full story
The 451 Research makes interesting for any CTO still wrestling with the issue of cloud – or those looking to further to contain their costs. But the fact that the study only looked into salaries and workload means that other important considerations may have been missed.
The vendor agnostic nature of OpenStack allows your business to deploy storage from any vendor, in virtually any configuration to suit your data needs. But rather than making additional capital spend to provide capacity, existing assets (including post warranty arrays) can be deployed into the OpenSource pool.
Backed by a suitable third party support and maintenance contract, the TCO of an on-site cloud solution falls even further. This frees up budget to be spent on other strategic projects, or to address potential improvements to the cloud platform itself.
Pause for thought
For years CTOs have been told that the cloud is the answer to their capacity costs – at least in terms of cost. And in some cases, this is true.
But the 451 Research findings prove that you should take a second look at your data strategy before buying into hosted private cloud.
For more help and advice, including how to repurpose your post warranty assets, please get in touch.