IaaS Cloud Pricing

Important:The product name for this user guide has changed from Foundation and Cloudscape to Business Service Discovery and Migration Planning. Previous UI pages known as Foundation have changed to Business Service Discovery. Previous UI pages known as CloudScape have changed to Migration Planning.

IaaS cloud pricing is described in the following sections:

About Cloud Pricing
Instance Matching
Supported Cloud Providers
Cloud Pricing Values

About Cloud Pricing

The IaaS Cloud Pricing feature (Add Intelligence > Cloudscape > IaaS Cloud Pricing) simplifies the process of pricing and comparing cloud providers by determining the instance types that best fit the workloads in the environment, and the base costs associated with those instances.

Instance Matching

The core functionality of the IaaS Cloud Pricing feature is its ability to determine which instance type for a given provider best fits a system. There are two types of instance matches, based on differing data, inventory and usage.

Inventory matching compares the resources present and usable (provisioned) by the device against the various cloud instances, to provide a match on what is already present in the environment. However, many systems may not be utilizing the full potential of the hardware.
Usage matching determines the instance type that is the best fit for the actual workload (performance) of the system, based on the data collected during the performance collection period of the assessment.

The IaaS Cloud Pricing page includes a Calculate Cloud Pricing pop-up window with the following options:

Assume blob storage 
Match disks based on throughput (BETA).

Our system recommends the lowest-cost available instance, which accommodates each server’s CPU and memory needs. Instances typically include some storage built into the virtual machine for use as the root volume of the system, and is included in the base cost of the instance.

If you choose the Blob Storage option, we will provide a storage cost estimation based on the server’s storage utilization, but we will not recommend different storage classes or consider throughput capacity in our instance recommendation. Storage cost is based on inventory data, so the inventory and usage matching will be the same.

If you choose Match disks based on throughput, our system will provide recommendations for provisioned storage classes based on measured disk IO and throughput. In the case where a server’s recommended storage class is not available to all instances in a provider’s portfolio, we will exclude unsupported instances from that server’s potential instance matching pool. This cost-matching method is recommended for workloads known to have high rates of disk read and write operations.

Storage Metrics

When calculating the blob storage cost for a device for a given provider, any storage included in the instance is deducted from a system's reported storage prior to calculating the cost. For instance, if a system has 200 GB of storage and matches an instance with 40 GB of included storage, storage cost is calculated for 160 GB. If the instance's included storage exceeds the system's reported storage, then the storage cost will be 0.

The quantity of storage calculated for a system is the summation of all locally attached storage, using the total size of each volume rather than utilized storage, from which any included instance storage is subtracted as explained in Instance Matching.

When calculating provisioned disk storage cost, we account for storage utilization, throughput, and IOPS (number of read/write operations per second) based on the provider’s reported costs to provision each element.

Note:Not all providers / storage classes have costs associated with all three metrics.

We recommend the lowest-cost storage class, which can accommodate the 95th-percentile observed value of disk throughput and IOPS. In the rare case when no known storage class is capable of accommodating a server’s observed performance, we will recommend the closest match, and set a flag (Storage Under Max) to warn that the workload may be incompatible with that cloud provider.

The following table describes the storage metrics listed in the IaaS Cloud Pricing page when provisioned disk matching has been performed.

IaaS Cloud Pricing Column

Description

Storage Name

Displays the recommended storage class name based on the selected cloud provider.

Storage Cost per hour

Displays the storage cost per hour for the recommended storage class.

Storage Under Max

Displays Yes when the device is within the StorageIO and the StorageThroughput limits for the associated storage class.

Displays No when the device exceeds the StorageIO or the StorageThroughput limits for the associated storage class.

Storage

Displays the data size in terms of GB.

Storage Throughput Cost

Displays the cloud provider’s storage throughput cost for the storage class listed under the Storage Name column.

 

Network IO

No flow data being collected—By default (no flow data is being collected), we calculate the total bytes that each server sends (by watching its network interfaces through polling) in a given month and then apply the cloud provider’s cost to that number for a month. We then divide back to get the cost per hour. This assumes that ALL traffic leaving any server’s interface is charged traffic.

So traffic between two servers in a stack will be counted even though it will not wind up being charged after migration. Our Network costs are considered “worst case” scenarios.

The CloudScape platform field named Instance Cost per hour reports the base cost of the matched instance.

Supported Cloud Providers

The following are the supported cloud providers:

Amazon AWS
Microsoft Azure
Google Cloud Platform
Rackspace
Softlayer
Quest Technology Management

Cloud Pricing Values

The following is a list of the information generated by the CloudScape cloud pricing module and reported to the user for each server for both inventory and usage based matching.

CPU Calculation
Memory Calculation
Storage
Storage IO
Network IO
Total Daily Cost

For more information, see Cloud Pricing Change Log.