You know that your business can benefit from cloud computing, but when you’re choosing which cloud platform to utilize, there are a number of factors to consider, from cost to privacy and more. Some companies have embraced the public cloud, with its flexibility and easy scalability, while others have chosen a private cloud model that offers increased control over critical data and applications. We proved that a hybrid cloud from Dell EMC and VMware can offer the best of both worlds, saving your IT department money and giving you control over your data.
Earlier this year in the Principled Technologies datacenters, we configured and tested an on-premises Dell EMC and VMware hybrid-ready cloud next to the Amazon public cloud service, Amazon Web Services (AWS). Based on our findings, implementing and maintaining the Dell EMC and VMware hybrid cloud could cost up to 45 percent less over five years than running a comparable AWS public cloud solution.
In order to calculate the total cost of ownership (TCO) over five years for both environments, our first step was to figure out how many database operations per minute (OPM) the Dell EMC solution could support. We chose an online transaction processing (OLTP) workload to do so and deployed Windows Server 2012 R2 virtual machines (VMs) with SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition on both the Dell EMC hybrid-ready cloud and the public AWS cloud. For the Dell EMC solution, we used two Dell EMC PowerEdge FX2s with Dell EMC PowerEdge FC630 servers and FD332 storage blocks with VMware vCloud Suite for cloud management.
In our testing, a similarly configured single Amazon EC2 instance achieved a total of 33,000 database OPM. To determine how many similarly configured database VMs our Dell EMC solution could support at the same level of performance, we grew the number of VMs on the Dell EMC hybrid-ready cloud until the database OPM of each VM fell below the threshold of 33,000. This occurred at 23 VMs—meaning that when our Dell EMC and VMware hybrid-ready cloud was hosting 22 database VMs, each VM could perform at the same level as a single AWS EC2 instance. We then used this number to compare the costs of the Dell EMC solution to the costs of running 22 AWS EC2 instances in the public cloud.
At the time we published our report, we priced the Dell EMC and VMware cloud solution over five years— including hardware, software, and ongoing datacenter maintenance—at $712,743.08. Pricing the Amazon solution was more complex, because it offered multiple payment options. We examined two:
- 3 Year All Upfront Reserved billing option for 22 Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances with Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) storage volume, at a cost of $880,232 with a long-term commitment
- 22 Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances with ESB storage volumes, at a cost of $1,306,651 with a pay-as-you-go plan
Regardless of which Amazon option you choose, the Dell EMC and VMware cloud provided the lowest TCO over five years, saving you up to $593,908 over five years—a 45 percent lower five-year TCO.
In addition to cost savings, this Dell EMC and VMware hybrid-ready cloud solution could help you retain more control of your applications and data, which administrators can manage onsite, while allowing you to leverage public cloud resources for applications more suited to an off-premises model. With this solution, you can take advantage of both public and private cloud benefits while saving money for your organization over time.
Learn more by reading the full report at facts.pt/LmzRhV.
This blog was commissioned by Dell Technologies.
