David Linthicum published a good article on the lack of IT cost analysis and planning related to cloud a few weeks ago that is worth some discussion. The article highlights a study from the Big Data Group’s called the Cloud Cost Benchmark Study, which indicates AWS users are significantly underutilizing their usage of cloud, thus undercutting potential cost savings and highlighting large cloud inefficiencies. VentureBeat featured a similar story back in August 2012 saying “The cloud eats two-thirds of your cash“. Both of these articles, and the trend in general, highlight exactly why 6fusion’s “metering first” approach is gaining traction.

Take this quote from Linthicum’s article for example:

“Planning means that we do some detailed modeling of how our system will exist within the target cloud platform.  This includes utilization of resources, and a model that depicts the cost of operating the system over time, and looking at ways to make the use of a cloud service more cost effective.”

6fusion’s IT cost analysis is a first step in that direction by providing accurate measurements of how much computing capacity an organization has and what it costs to run per unit of compute. Combine that with the fact that a federated network of public cloud providers is using that same unit of compute to measure IT resource consumption in their public cloud environments and you have the ability to get real data on what your cloud resource consumption will be before you ever move to the public cloud.

Another quote from Linthicum:

“Deep management should be implemented that monitors the utilization of resources, with a link to cost data.  Right now, many cloud-based systems are not monitored, or just monitored for up-time statistics.  Operational monitoring should also include costs of resources utilized, allowing the operator to tune the systems to provide the best operational performance at the lowest cost.”

Absolutely agree. 6fusion’s Cloud Resource Meter was designed for metering IT resource consumption across public and private cloud environments.  Using the right IT operational metrics are absolutely critical in getting the efficiency gains you are looking for. 6fusion’s IT metric is the Workload Allocation Cube, which incorporates CPU, Memory, Storage, LAN I/O, WAN I/O, and DISK I/O into a commercial standard metric that is used across virtual, physical, public and private environments around the world today.

But it all comes down to metering first and a strong IT cost analysis up front sets the groundwork for future success in the cloud.

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