Private/public cloud costs: a summary table


I had the great pleasure to converse on twitter along with the exceptional Simon Wardley, a longtime expert and researcher on company innovation, evolution and.. cloud computing. Among the limit of 140 characters, it was quite difficult to convey any sensible concept in such a short space. One of the interesting thing is that it is difficult to provide a sensible comparison between private and public clouds in absence of real numbers. So, since we just finished a research report for a major UK public authority, I will just add my own 2 eurocents and present a summary table of some examples of private, public and dedicated cluster costs:

System $/Core-hour
Hopper [19] $0.018
Montero-Llorente [31] $0.04
Magellan (overall) [19] $0.04
Class 1 server/workstation [7] $0.046
Cornell RedCloud [53] $0.058
Our estimate $0.06
Amazon cc1.4xl, resv. instance $0.062
Amazon cc1.4xl $0.093
CINN [7] $0.1

This is of course just a snippet of more than 40 pages; cost includes management and amortization over 3 years for hardware, 5 years for infrastructure. Our own estimate is for a self-managed, self-assembled system with no best practices, while Magellan is a realistic estimate of a median cost for a well-managed and well-procured infrastructure. Hopper is a custom cluster out of commodity hardware and can be considered the best approachable price point for 2011 in terms of cost/core for a private cloud as well. In the paper (that I hope will be published soon) there will be additional details on the actual model, the estimates and the sources for the data. Hope it may be useful for someone.

  1. No comments yet.
(will not be published)

  1. No trackbacks yet.