Pythian Blog: Technical Track

Azure total cost of ownership calculator

Microsoft has released a new Azure Total Cost Ownership (TCO) Calculator. This calculator allows you to quickly enter in your current on-premises workload and review the expected savings or costs of moving to Azure. Workloads You simply enter in your current server, database, storage and network usage. I've put together a simple example environment of a few applications and web servers speaking to a database backend with a small HDD SAN and an overpowered network.
  • 5 VMware Windows Servers with 8 cores and 64 GB of RAM
  • 1 SQL Server Instance on VMWare Windows with 16 cores and 128 GB of RAM
  • 12 TB of HDD SAN
  • A 10 GB Network
Assumptions Then you define your assumptions. For someone just playing around with the calculator, Microsoft helpfully fills in some (generous) assumptions on the cost of electricity, hardware, software, etc... If you're using this calculator in the real world, you'll need to pull out your IT budgeting spreadsheets and plug in some real numbers. For this example, I left them untouched. Report And a nice report is created! Unsurprisingly, and maybe even reflecting reality, the calculator shows I could save more than a million dollars over five years! Your mileage will obviously vary. [caption id="attachment_104404" align="aligncenter" width="993"] Graph showing Azure Savings Graph showing Azure Savings[/caption] There are several detailed cost calculations below the heading which can help prove your argument (if you're arguing for Azure). Overall, I think this is a great starting point for anyone wondering if the savings are really worth the effort of migrating. The default calculations show that even a relatively small environment can save considerable amounts of money by moving to a public cloud. What do you think? Any issues with the assumptions or calculations?

No Comments Yet

Let us know what you think

Subscribe by email