Presented by Movere
Many IT consultancies and cloud providers do everything they can to facilitate expedited cloud migrations to help deliver on the needs of enterprise organizations. This expedited approach typically involves a “lift and shift” of on-premises systems to a cloud environment, with the promise that optimization will happen later once everything is functioning in the cloud. But why do something twice, when you can save a lot of resources by doing it right the first time?
Consider this analogy: home ownership is to on-premises as renting is to the Cloud.
When buying a home, you consider both your current and anticipated needs. You think about size, configuration, location, environment, cost — if you need a guest room or not, travel time to and from the office, if your family will grow because of kids or aging parents, etc. Once you have a sense of what you’ll need and how you anticipate the home will be used, you pull the trigger and make a purchase that you hope will satisfy those needs for the next 5-10 years.
Setting up on-premises infrastructure follows a similar logic. You consider the number and configuration of servers, location, cooling needs, power supply, disaster recovery facilities, physical security, etc. Just like buying a house, once you’ve identified both what you think you need now and for the foreseeable future, you make the purchase and start leveraging the investment.
And then, life happens. What you thought your life was going to look like is not always how it ends up: the guest room goes unused, that workout room you needed has simply become a place to hang your clothes. And like your home, over time, on-premises environments become equally less useful.
Movere has analyzed over 70 billion data points collected from over 1,000 enterprise customers in the last 18 months and has found that, on average, 3-5 percent of systems could be consolidated or decommissioned today, and no one would notice. But, we rationalize that the money has already been spent, the infrastructure is owned, so it doesn’t really impact the bottom line if we keep things “as-is.” Or does it?
Why pay for what you’re not using?
Maintaining on-premises infrastructure is expensive and dated systems limit innovation. The cloud is desirable to increase IT spend efficiencies while also increasing your capacity for innovation. So, now, despite how comfortable you are in the house, you’re being asked by executives to shift from being a home owner to a renter. Here’s why.
Continued analysis of those 70 billion data points indicates average on-premises CPU consumption is typically less than 5 percent, while average memory consumption is around 50 percent. If you begin to look for a rental based on the same criteria you used to buy the house, you’re going to end up overpaying for a cloud configuration that is significantly over-provisioned and under-utilized. Who wants to do that?
At Movere, we not only take inventory of your current environment but capture Actual Resource Consumption (ARC) data so that you know exactly how your environment is being used. By leveraging utilization data, you quickly begin to realize that not only do you not use the guest room and workout room, but the third bedroom that you’re keeping for your college-age kid? It’s only needed four hours out of the day at two-week bursts. With the scalability features of most public cloud providers, you can have that room for those two weeks and only pay for the four hours a day it’s used.
Right-sizing the cloud
Moving to the cloud requires a multi-faceted analysis. Simply replicating what you have on-premises to the cloud doesn’t work because shifting a decades-old server with a Gen4 Intel chip to a cloud-equivalent Gen7 just isn’t going to function the same, regardless of core/thread count equivalency. Making those process-level calculations is near-impossible to do manually. Add in the complexity introduced by hyperscalers like hundreds of vm profile sizes, various storage options, dozens of regional variances, and other variables, and it’s enough to make your head spin.
Movere recommends automating the analysis of data across eight different variables to provide the insight needed to size your cloud right the first time. Calculating cloud sizing that considers CPU, memory, IOPS, throughput, networking, storage, cloud region and price is the only way to accurately configure the cloud before migration. This same data can be used to identify systems prime for optimization before migration.
Because, let’s be honest: moving is a drag — it’s expensive, time-consuming, and increases the chance for things to get broken. And, once you settle in to your new space, the last thing you want to do is move again.
Dig deeper: Learn more about how Movere can help you right-size your cloud migration.
Andrew Ireland is Chief Evangelist and co-founder of Movere.
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