Getting the amount of private cloud right
Customers frequently want to know how the ROI on public cloud versus private cloud can be calculated.
In order to calculate this, they must look at what they would have spent for the same capacity through a public cloud service over a three-year period, factoring in the hardware and operative costs that private cloud can save on.
Organisations need to remember when they build a cloud that they want it to be sized appropriately. They need a bit of additional capacity to anticipate growth spikes in traffic, but at the same time they don't want to buy too much and end up being wasteful.
Take, for example, a project that Redapt completed for a gaming manufacturing company.
SHFL Entertainment -- a manufacturer of shuffling machines, table games, slot machines, and other casino products, based in Nevada -- went to Redapt (PDF), a data infrastructure service provider, with the need to develop a cloud-based infrastructure to better distribute SHFL's online games.
The infrastructure had to be secure and meet compliance regulations for wager-based games. It also had to be an affordable alternative to public cloud services that provided a high level of control.
It was interesting to see Redapt needing to size and architect a solution that was compatible with the Rightscale cloud management tool used by SHFL. Redapt then needed to deploy the infrastructure as a service to three different locations around the world. Lastly, Redapt needed to monitor and manage the infrastructure as a service on an ongoing basis.
All the while, SHFL needed to solve an internal math problem of needing to calculate just the right ratios of virtual memory, primary disk, and data.
David Cantu, chief operating officer at Redapt wanted to make sure the cloud built for SHFL was sized at the right amount. Cantu said that companies need a private cloud with additional capacity to anticipate growth and spikes in traffic, without being wasteful.
He and his team chose Intel Xeon Processors E5-2650 to pack more power into a smaller footprint, which helped in meeting crucial ratios. The density of the cores was important for meeting customer capacity requirements in a much denser footprint.
Redapt's project with SHFL demonstrates the importance of capacity requirements in any cloud project, to take into consideration overall cloud costs and energy consumption.