Cloud Capacity Part 2: Plan Your Consumption

Cloud CapacityIn the first part I presented some basic concepts and an overview of cloud capacity management. cloud capacity discussion has two main aspects:

  1. Infrastructure capacity management by the IaaS vendor to plan capacity of the cloud data-center to optimize utilization and decrease operations costs.
  2. Cloud resources consumption by the cloud consumers  (any IT organization such as a SaaS vendor) including planning capacity demand in order to achieve efficient consumption of the purchased cloud resources. In this part I will discuss this aspect.

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The Inevitable Outage of the Cloud

Cloud Disaster Recovery DilbertTraditionally delivering high availability often meant replicating everything. However, today with the option of going to the cloud we can say that providing two of everything is costly. High availability should be planned and achieved at several different levels: including the software, the data center and the geographic redundancy. According to a recent study the cost of a data center outage ranges from a minimum cost of $38,969 to a maximum of $1,017,746 per organization, with an overall average cost of $505,502 per incident.

1 – Total cost of partial and complete outages can be a significant expense for organizations.

2 – Total cost of outages is systematically related to the duration of the outage.

3 – Total cost of outages is systematically related to the size of the data center

4 – Certain causes of the outage are more expensive than others.  Specifically, IT equipment failure is the most expensive root cause.  Accidental/human error is least expensive.

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