If your customers are considering moves to the cloud, it can be difficult to calculate the ongoing workload costs. There are so many different scenarios to take into consideration. Poor planning, lack of knowledge and inconsistent management often trigger cloud overspending, a recent RightScale report concluded.
With those concerns and challenges in mind, Nerdio has launched a Microsoft-centric Azure Cost Estimator. The web-based tool allows anyone to comprehensively calculate the costs of running IT in Microsoft's public cloud.
The Azure Cost Estimator from Nerdio not only tallies cloud expenditures, but any combination of components like Office 365, RDS CAL, VDI, GPU, and Windows servers. It can also take into account the number of desktops needed, storage space and dedicated server requirements.
Still, there are some variables to keep in mind: The tool does make a series of standard assumptions for parameters like bandwidth, storage access, or user to CPU core ratio, using pricing based on average East US 2 region prices. Users can change and customize these to fit their specific needs.
Nerdio's core business model is providing optimization tools for cloud environments like Azure. So it's hardly surprising the tool also lets users estimate savings based on the company's optimization features. These include Azure's Hybrid Usage Benefit, end-user performance monitoring, and Intelligent AutoScale, which dynamically resizes or shuts down remote desktop hosts and VDI desktops based on actual usage trends.
The Azure Cost Estimator is just a one-page list of questions about your users, desktops, servers, and additional tools. As you adjust the numbers, you will see the estimated cost change in real time. When you are finished, you can either use the real-time updated cost at the top, or click to be sent the full details of the cost breakdown.
If you request the breakdown, you will be required to enter your name, email address, phone number and a few other details. As an IT service provider, you can mock up and print out several different scenarios to present to decision-makers in the company -- and then decide what information to potentially share with customers.
A tool like this can be great for people who are exploring cloud transformations. And for those who are already using cloud services, this could be a new way to estimate potential costs before workloads rise or fall.
