Hi All. I work in the UK public sector. UK government has a 'Digital by Default' policy that mandates that cloud infrastructure is used by default, unless there is a very good reason why not to use it in a particular circumstance.
I was therefore very interested to see the Cloud Cost (EC2) dashboard in Virtualization Manager, which we have recently purchased. I was surprised to see how expensive the EC2 comparison worked out so have been trying to untangle how it does it. I have found the algorithms used in the relevant Trend configurations and have put my own data manually into the Amazon pricing guide at http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html . In my case, Solarwinds gave me a monthly cost of $126000. The nearest I could get with Amazon was $114000 butthis was using on demand pricing at 100% usage. You would never do this - on demand is for transient use. A more realistic one year medium use rate gives a monthly cost of $76000, which is a lot less than Solarwinds predicts - not even in the same ball park.
Does anyone have any further information about the assumptions made by Solarwinds and why they were picked? Being able to show cost effectiveness is a big issue for us at the moment. The calculator would be a great weapon in our armoury but I need to know that the figures are defensible. Any help appreciated.
I've attached a word doc with the cloud monthly cost algorithm and some screenshots from Amazon showing on demand and 1 year costs.
Many thanks
Andy