Making The Move To The Cloud

We Take The Confusion Out Of Cloud Computing

Have You Been Tasked with Figuring Out How to Move On-Premise Workloads to the Cloud?

Are you confused with where to even start? MetrixData 360 has a solution that can help you out.  

Sizing your instances before you move to the cloud is the first step to sleeping easier at night.  The second is to monitor both Azure and AWS to ensure costs don’t creep out of control.

Azure Sizing

Looking to move on-premise workloads to Azure, but unsure of what size of Azure Instances you need to purchase?

Getting this wrong can cost your company and your IT Budget substantially. Nailing this and getting this right is only the first step. The challenge is that if you’ve ever read anything on sizing Azure Instances, you will find a ton of information that is just plain confusing.

Microsoft has 11 different Azure Virtual Machine Series (you can check them out here. These series range from the Entry-Level A Series (typically economical for development and test servers) to the N-Series (GPU capable Virtual Machines (VMs) that are ideal for compute and graphic intensive workloads).

Within each VM Series, there are multiple sizes. For instance, the A family has an A1 to A11 VM. Each instance comes with different compute (CPU, Memory, Storage, etc). If you look out across all the different Series, there are hundreds of Azure Compute Instances to choose from.

AWS Sizing

AWS isn’t much easier to understand. Although instead of 11 different families to choose from, they limit you to a much easier (hope you caught the sarcasm there) 5 families. Starting with their General-Purpose offering (suggested to be used for web servers and code repositories) to Storage Optimized Compute (designed for workloads that need high read write access to large data sets). You can check out AWS instance types here

Similar to Microsoft, they have multiple instance families but tend to name them by size (e.g. a1.medium).

Cloud Sizing

Many of our customers were just like you. Unsure of where to even start when it came to moving their workloads from their own data centres to AWS or Azure. They have been told that they can save money by moving to the cloud, but have also heard the horror stories of companies that moved to the cloud and then had budgets that spiralled out of control to support those moves.

Often our clients come to us looking for ways to figure out how to size their cloud instances. We have heard that they were afraid they were going to have to go into large consulting engagements that would cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars just to figure this out. They were looking to MetrixData 360 to provide them with expertise on how to keep their costs down.

So, we set out on a mission to help people like you. Our goal was to find a tool that had a positive return on investment, one that could be used not only to determine how to size instances as they moved to the cloud, but one that could be used to monitor AWS and Azure to ensure cloud spend did not get out of control.

In speaking with clients and industry experts who had been through this, it became clear to us that Densify was the answer. We began looking at our clients’ on-premise VMWare environment and what they currently had in the cloud, and we saw amazing results. We were seeing ROIs of less than 5 months by putting Densify in their environments. And what was best is it has a bonus for you.

Cloud Licensing Optimization and Monitoring Service

Our Cloud Licensing Optimization and Monitoring service powered by Densify allows us to monitor your on-premise VMWare environment and optimize your VMs. By utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI), you will receive reports on your environment that allow you to move Virtual Machines between Hosts to a more optimal configuration. Think of it sort of like playing Tetris by organizing your VMs and software licenses to do the same work with fewer hosts.

By monitoring this, we can decrease software license costs for things like Windows Server, SQL Server, and VMWare licenses. Often, this on-premise optimization alone can justify the costs of the service. However, Densify also monitors your on-premise VMs and, again utilizing AI, determines the most cost effective compute instances to move those VMs to either Azure or AWS. This secondary level of optimization ensures you continue to save money across these systems. 

Once you have moved to the cloud, you continue to save money with our Cloud Licensing and Monitoring Service, since we continue to focus on cost savings once you are in the cloud.

How Can We Help You Today?

Your time is valuable – we respect that. When scheduling a time to talk about how we can help you, we won’t bombard you with hundreds of needless emails and endless phone calls from aggressive sales reps you don’t want to talk to. Instead, Jay Bishop (that’s him in the video below), one of our Client Success Specialists, will listen to you about what challenges you are facing and confirm our understanding of what your goals are. We only move forward if you think we might be a good fit for you – that’s it. Our commitment is to zero high-pressure sales tactics from us – ever. With every client we’ve ever worked with ready and willing to do reference calls for us, we know the value in the results our services bring to our clients. We look forward to you learning and experiencing it for your yourself!