Four analysis of cloud computing ROI

The issue of Return on cloud investment (ROI) is often a matter of concern, with many articles written on the subject and with different attitudes. The tangible benefits and intangible benefits such as agility, rapid response, infrastructure/http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/14223.html, and the speed of the > Application system are our special concerns today.

Server efficiency

The accepted average usage of a dedicated server (the time really used) is percent. I've validated this number with a lot of CIOs, and most of them are approved. This means that dedicated servers consume energy, occupy space and manage resources for 85% of the time, but have no substantial contribution to the company. Using virtualization to get out of the hardware and allowing multiple applications to run in this virtual environment can improve server usage. The capacity-use curve created by Amazon also illustrates this, although it's just an increase in demand, but obviously not always.

Amazon's capacity to use the curve

In an article titled "Clearing the Air in cloud computing," McKinsey claims that the use of any place can reach with through standardized and aggressive virtualization. It means you can do it with half a server, meaning you can save 50% on energy consumption, maintenance and space. It also means that fewer business resources are needed to manage the environment, and it is clear that capital spending is also low.

In a detailed study, VMware identified the following results:

Return on investment for the first six months (ROI): 189%

Reduced hardware and software costs: 63%

Reduced IT operating costs: 70%

Reduced procurement costs: 50%

CPU average usage: LED before virtualization 60–70%

Server consolidation rate reaches: 12:1

My personal view is that CPU usage reaches 60–70% only in companies where it needs to be very stable. But even if we stick to the with and halve the number of VMware, we can save landfilled costs, which is the return on investment over the year.

Storage efficiency

How much storage do you assign to users and applications? How many of them are actually used every moment of the day? It may not even be 50%, so if we virtualize the storage and remove the direct link between the storage allocation and the actual available storage, we don't need a total store that corresponds to the sum of the storage allocations. That's what storage virtualization does and what companies like 3PAR specialize in. A UK fund manager, for example, says it has cut its allocation time by 90%, reduced maintenance costs by 50%, and is not talking about a reduction in capital spending.

Reduce operator

Virtualization with automation solves another level of cost problems. In fact, the automation of many key it processes not only reduces the number of operators, but also reduces the occurrence of errors. Do you remember Amazon's latest outage, which looked like a human error. In fact, Amazon stated, "We will check our change process and increase automation to prevent such errors from happening again." ”

With regard to the benefits of automation, HP conducted a deep survey to explore the benefits of automation from 9 aspects. Here I just want to focus on the People reduction Section, and here's their conclusion:

Storage Administrator ratio: After configuring HP Storage Essentials, the amount of storage is increased by one-fold, and the number of administrators is unchanged.

Desktop system Administrator ratio: The number of administrators per 1000 desktop systems has been reduced by 10 times times.

Server system administrator ratio: the proportion of each server administrator grew from 1:100 to 1:150.

In other words, the staff was reduced by at least 50%. Now these numbers are misleading because you first need to add resources to creating automated workflows, so in the short term the benefits may not be that large, but once the automation is created, it can be reused.

Call Center/help Desk cost

Do you remember the times when you needed to call for new services? Now the time has come to pass. Configuration requirements no longer need to call the call center to resolve. In fact, by selecting and asking for the appropriate application on the portal site, you assume the role of the call center yourself. Although you may not think this will save you much, these are definitely included.

How about using the public cloud?

In this article, I mainly highlight what you can save by using a private cloud environment. Is the public cloud actually cheaper? This is to be treated differently. We studied the price of Amazon and Google Cloud services, and if the annual capacity was less than 8 weeks, the public cloud would be cheaper. If it takes a long time, the private cloud is actually cheaper. The McKinsey study cited above has the same conclusion.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)