In “The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox” article, Andreessen Horowitz’s Sarah Wang and Martin Casado make an interesting observation: as organizations scale and growth slows down, their gross margins diminish because public cloud costs increase and contribute significantly to the cost of goods sold (COGS). They argue that the ease and agility of the public cloud are great while an organization is in fast-growth mode but might not be a sustainable operating model. Organizations are looking at ways to understand, control and contain public cloud costs, via cloud cost management tools or hiring third-party consultants. Others are evaluating cloud repatriation, which means shifting workloads or data from the public cloud into infrastructure environments placed on-premises or co-location facilities, leveraging multi, hybrid, or private clouds.
Organizations often look to public cloud for increased agility, simplified operations and accelerated innovation. Private cloud or on-premises infrastructure is where businesses turn for increased control, enhanced performance and predictable costs. What’s clear is that both scenarios have their advantages. But you would have to make trade-offs if selecting one over the other. For example, you could lose or gain agility, better or worst cost predictability and control, service level and performance attainability, talent availability.
But what if you didn’t need to choose when considering cloud repatriation? What if you could bring together the best aspects of both? Imagine an approach that bridges the divide between the agility of public cloud and the control of on-premises. Delivering the best outcomes of each and without the complexity of either one. Dell APEX provides simplicity, agility, and control. Allowing you to place your workload or data wherever you need them and benefit from technology delivered as-a-Service. How can APEX deliver on cost, performance, and with a cloud-like experience?
Dell commissioned an independent, third party study by Principled Technologies to evaluate two solutions that enable companies to consume enterprise-level storage without purchasing storage arrays, meaning in an as-a-Service model. They found that APEX can deliver up to 81% monthly storage costs savings with similar performance compared to AWS.
They compared the performance and monthly cost of:
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- APEX Data Storage Services (50TB Balanced-tier block storage)
- Amazon EBS io2 Block Express (16x3TB volumes with 21,916 provisioned IOPS each)
Principled Technologies configured the AWS solution to match the APEX Data Storage Services IOPS and throughput performance for their evaluation. Both solutions had sub-millisecond database sequential read latency; however, the APEX solution achieved a shorter average wait latency than the AWS solution.
Additional to cost-savings and performance, organizations want to be protected against cyberattacks and outages, and they want to ensure their data resides in known locations to help satisfy compliance obligations. With APEX, customers have complete control over their data and can build a cybersecurity strategy that works for them while leveraging Dell Technologies infrastructure designed for 99.9999%¹ availability to reduce unplanned downtime.
The example above is just one of many where we can help our customers to achieve their business and technology outcomes across industries, use cases, and workloads. Of course, cost-saving is not the only driver when considering cloud repatriation, albeit an important one. Concerns such as security and regulation, performance, availability, human capital, vendor lock-in, and hidden costs are all part of the decision. In the same way, you build a strategy and plan for cloud migration, you need one to repatriate your workloads or data.
We can help our customers to reduce the trade-offs between public cloud and on-premises. We can support them if they want to leverage public cloud (or multiple public clouds). Or, if it makes more sense for them to repatriate back on-premises or co-location, we can also help them in doing so by offering simplicity, agility, and control.
To learn more about how APEX can help you with your digital transformation while taking advantage of an as-a-service operating model, visit our website or reach out to a Dell Technologies representative.
You can read the full report from Principled Technologies here.
¹ Based on hardware availability on common underlying platform configurations. Actual hardware availability may vary.
