VMware: Amazon's cloud calculator a load of flatulant FUD VMware says Amazon's new total cost of ownership calculator uses "biased and inaccurate assumptions" when comparing the cost of VMware's software with Amazon's. The virtualization company, which competes with Amazon's AWS cloud via its own recently-launched vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) tech, released a blog post on Friday …
Yes. I cannot imagine that a marketing department from any organisation would be accurate factual or truthful. Gotta work it out for yourself if you can find a way through the obfuscation.
It would be a shocker if one or the other actually agreed with the competitions findings as a result of the application of scientific methodology. "We tested the claims and we have failed to find a flaw in the data, they are correct and we cant beat that"
Its complete nonsense, i mean are they also going to try and factor in the human cost of managing an on premises installation over the human cost of managing a virtual one in the cloud? They won't be the same, but seem to have been forgotten here. There is also the case that yes, some customers may have some hardware already, but how many of those are already vmware customers and how many of them are deciding which to use? Out of those still deciding, how much of their hardware is new enough to support the latest vmware tech? Too many questions to answer for a generic comparison.
VMware updated their TCO period to 4 years, which I think is likely for IT hardware these days (I know our IT seems like it is trying to stretch to 5).
That said, I didn't see VMware's estimate for data center costs. Even if not using granular costing, most data centers have a charge either per rack or per power drop (or both).
Of course there are some tasks where it's a real choice: bug tracking systems, version control etc - but I suspect for a lot of use cases one or the other has obvious failings. Sensitive internal data might not even be *allowed* out of the building; anything needing high bandwidth (video content, for example) would get painfully expensive on EC2, the extra latency could be a killer for anything interactive.
Conversely, there's licensing. If we needed occasional use of some big expensive package, the per-hour pricing could be a godsend. At my previous place, we had a big hefty Oracle setup for running the monthly payroll, complete with hefty licensing costs: just cranking up an Amazon RDS Oracle instance when needed could have saved a fortune on that workload. (When I left, it was still running in on-site VMWare nodes - which cost a fortune. Of course, any changes to that particular workload were to be approached with extreme caution, getting paid being rather important to us all...)
Wow, I didn't realise that data transfer, rack space, power usage and IP addresses are included with the VMware license costs. Very nice of them to cover those costs as they tend to be significant. I'll be speaking to our VMware partner immediately, as we're definitely paying for that.
I also didn't realise that VMware also include the ability to migrate VMs to other locations/datacentres within a matter of minutes.
Mind you I would always argue with VMware's use of "cloud" in their marketing guff (in fact most uses of the word "cloud" in marketing guff). In this specific guff they refer to a 5 host "cluster", all connected to the same network, in the same datacentre, and in the same country. That doesn't sound much like a cloud in my book - that's just some servers in colo.
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