ZeroStack vs. AWS TCO Comparison ZeroStack s private cloud as-a-service offers significant cost advantages over public clouds.

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1 @ZeroStackInc ZeroStack vs. AWS TCO Comparison ZeroStack s private cloud as-a-service offers significant cost advantages over public clouds. White Paper

2 Introduction Cloud is rapidly becoming the default platform for building and deploying applications. Developers need a self-service environment to build, test and deploy their applications. Engineering organizations today have two choices. On one hand, Public clouds like AWS offer flexibility, agility and simplicity to spin up their own Data Center from as small as a virtual machine (VM) to an entire rack or row equivalent, in matter of minutes with a virtual swipe of a credit card. Granular and transparent pricing of AWS makes it easy and cost-effective to bring up a small environment in no time. This is compared with internal IT teams taking weeks and months to build an on-premises self-service cloud, before developers can get access to resources and setting up those CI/CD pipelines, devops and automation. In addition, there is also a much bigger upfront capital expense on infrastructure before a single line of code is written - a lot of which doesn t see much utilization until much later as the app dev/test team scales. However, as the environment scales, even to modest levels of physical hosts, the costs associated with AWS pay by-the-bite model start spiraling out of control. There comes a cross-over point where owning, deploying, managing and running on-premises infrastructure becomes actually cheaper than the granular pay-as-go-pricing of AWS from at TCO standpoint. Yet, the complexity of building and running an on-premises cloud is overwhelming, and is usually what prevents organizations from deploying their own private cloud. The ZeroStack Advantage ZeroStack provides the only private cloud solution that customers can deploy on-premises or in any colocation facility in a matter of a few minutes. After about 30 minutes of Day-0 installation exercise, the ongoing monitoring and operations are handled automatically using ZeroStack s self-healing distributed architecture, intelligent software, cloud-based management portal and ZeroStack s analytics-driven systems operations center (SOC). This enables the same flexibility and agility as that of an AWS public cloud with the greater simplicity of building a ZeroStack-based private cloud. In doing so, ZeroStack has significantly reduced the time to value to a few hours, if not minutes. So, the only impediment to deploying an on-premises private cloud might be the associated costs of this solution. In this document we compare the total cost of running an IaaS environment for a hypothetical born-inthe-cloud application development team if they were to repatriate their environment on the ZeroStack solution (on-premise or to a collocated data center) and compare that to their current spend on AWS. As the environment scales, even to modest levels of physical hosts, the costs associated with AWS pay by-the-bite model start spiraling out of control. There comes a crossover point where owning, deploying, managing and running on-premises infrastructure becomes actually cheaper than the granular pay-as-go-pricing of AWS from a TCO standpoint. 2

3 Here are the four findings from our analysis: Percent Savings: The ZeroStack Private Cloud solution results in 54 percent total cost savings compared to AWS over a 3-year period for customers deploying as few as physical servers Percent Lower: 2nd- and 3rd-year cash flows of the ZeroStack Private Cloud are 63 percent lower compared to an AWS environment Perecent Lower: 1st-year cash flows of the ZeroStack Private Cloud are 43 percent lower compared to an AWS environment. 4. $510K Savings: ZeroStack Private Cloud saves $510K in costs over a three-year period compared to AWS (in this $400K annual AWS infrastructure spend example). ZeroStack Private Cloud solution results in 54 percent total cost savings compared to AWS over a 3-year period for customers deploying as few as physical servers. The Setup Consider a software company that has 50 developers who are doing software development using CI/CD tools such as Jira, Jenkins and Git to build, test and deploy bits. Realistically speaking, all of this TCO analysis also applies to a development team within a large organization. In order to keep the analysis simple, and to err on the side of conservatism (towards AWS), assume that customers are using public cloud only for IaaS and are not using any of the higher-priced PaaS services offered by AWS. In other words, they have rolled their own version of data pipeline, databases and analytics tools to build their application stack. The comparison assumes approximately four VMs per developer for dev/testing and a handful of VMs for actual deployment of tools and services like Git, DNS, VPN, and Jenkins, with a total of approximately 200 VMs. Since the actual VM size will vary significantly by type of organization and type of application, we will assume that each developer will need a total of ~50GB RAM for their 4 VMs for a total of 2500GB RAM across the 50 developers. In addition, every developer will need about 2TB of block storage 2000 IOPs for his or her personal development environment. This is a very typical requirement based on actual customer conversations. That is, this team will need a total of 100TB and 100K IOPs block storage for our 50-developer environment. So, to summarize, this hypothetical development environment consists of:» 50 developers» 200 VMs of different sizes in all» 100TB block 100K IOPs» 2500GB RAM The Reference Server For our reference server, we picked a Supermicro SuperServer with the following configuration:» Twelve-Core Intel Xeon Processor E v2 2.40GHz 30MB Cache (115W)» 8 x 32GB PC MHz DDR3 ECC Registered DIMM» 4 x 2.0TB SATA 6.0Gb/s 7200RPM Hitachi Ultrastar 7K6000 (512n)» 4 x 1.2TB Intel SSD DC S3520 Series 2.5 SATA 6.0Gb/s Solid State Drive» Intel 10-Gigabit Ethernet Converged Network Adapter X520-DA2 (2x SFP+) 3

4 This is a very nicely equipped server with 48 Hardware Threads (equivalent vcpus), 256GB RAM, 2x10Gbps+1Gbps IPMI NIC, 4.8TB SSD and 8.0 HDD storage. Based on Supermicro s online pricing, before any discounts or rebates, this server can be procured for under $11,000. For this environment, 10 such reference servers should suffice quite easily. This amounts to 480 Hardware Threads (vcpus), 2560 GB RAM, 48TB SSD and 80TB HDD at greater than 100K IOPS, which easily meets the need of our development team. Cost of AWS Instances Explained The size of developer VMs could vary significantly from 1 oversubscribed vcpu to 2 or 4 or even more vcpus per VM, and with that, the analysis becomes complex very quickly. Fortunately, the AWS pricing allows for little arbitrage opportunity when picking the total number of vcpus, RAM for any size of environment with respect to size and type of EC2 instances. In other words, regardless of the actual EC2 instance one picks in AWS, the pricing per vcpu-ram is about the same. For instance, examine two scenarios: 1. m4.4xlarge with 16 vcpus (2 vcpu = 1 Hyper Thread Core), 64GB RAM, cost $432/mo = $27/ vcpu/4gb RAM 2. t2.large with 2 vcpus, 8Gb RAM, costs $53/mo = $27/vCPU/4GB RAM Therefore, to the extent that developers VMs add up to a total 480 vcpus and 2560GB RAM, it doesn t matter which EC2 instance types are picked to arrive at that total number from a cost standpoint. AWS Cost Since AWS costs are the same, regardless of EC2 instance type, let s consider the use of all m4.4xlarge instances because of ease of comparison. Other teams might use a combination of different EC2 instances, but as shown above, that has little impact on their total costs. Table I: AWS Cost Using Extra-Large VMs On-demand Reserved 1-year, no upfront Reserved 3-year, 50% upfront pay Cost/Month/Instance $621 $432 $125 1st Year cost (30 Instances) $223,560 $155,520 $180,000 3 Year Cost (30 Instances) $670,680 $466,560 $270,000 EBS Cost/Dev/Month (2 TB SSD 2000 IOPS per developer) $380 $380 $380 1st Year Cash Flow (50 Devs) $228,000 $228,000 $228,000 3 Year Cost (50 Devs) $684,000 $684,000 $684,000 Total 1 Year Cash Flow $451,560 $383,520 $408,000 Total 3 Year Cost $1,354,680 $1,150,560 $954,000 Total 3 Year Cost per Core $5,645 $4,794 $3,975 A similar analysis with T2.large instances resulted in a total 3-year cost of (Reserved 1-Year, no upfront) $1,141,920. As expected, the two costs are very similar, within 1% of each other. 4

5 In addition, this team with 50 developers will also need a total of 100TB storage capacity and 100K provisioned IOPs of EBS storage. The two alternatives (AWS and Supermicro Server-based on-premises solution) are therefore perfectly comparable in terms of vcpus, RAM and storage. As explained earlier, the on-premises option with the Supermicro reference server solution delivers significantly higher IOPs and bandwidth. Table I shows the total AWS costs using the pricing from AWS on Dec 1, 2016: pricing/reserved-instances/pricing/ ZeroStack Private Cloud Cost Comparison Similar to AWS, ZeroStack does not require any cloud infrastructure experts; all the infrastructure management is done automatically by ZeroStack intelligent software and cloud-based proactive support as explained earlier. A general-purpose, part-time admin is needed, however, to rack and stack servers and do basic networking. These operations can also be offloaded to a colo service provider who provides smart hands. One such admin can easily handle 2-3 racks of datacenter infrastructure. Assuming just 50 servers per admin, the cost per server for a $100K admin is $2,000 per year per server. There is no need for a cloud architect. Note: Cost of external network IPs and WAN bandwidth is not factored in this analysis, neither for AWS nor for ZeroStack Private Cloud. The premise is that these need to be paid in both cases and are going to be similar. Now let us look at ZeroStack costs in Table II for a similar cost analysis as was done for AWS. Table II: ZeroStack Private Cloud Infrastructure Cost Server Cost (2 Sockets = 24 Cores) $11,000 Number of Servers 10 Colo cost/mo/server (electricity, power, coding) $80 ToR Switches (2 Qty) $20,000 Total 3 year Infrastructure Cost $158,800 Operational Expense ZS Software License/ Core/ Year $300 Data Center Technician Cost $20,000 Number of Data Center Technicians needed 1 Total 3 year software & Operations Cost $276,000 Total 3 Year Cost $434,800 Total 3 Year Cost per Core $1,812 5

6 Conclusions It is clear from the above analysis, there are four key facts: Percent Savings: The ZeroStack Private Cloud solution results in 54% total cost savings compared to AWS over a 3-year period for customers deploying as few as physical servers Percent Lower: Second- and third-year cash flows of the ZeroStack Private Cloud are 63 percent lower compared to AWS environment Percent Lower: First-year cash flows of the ZeroStack Private Cloud are 43 percent lower compared to the AWS environment. 4. $510K Savings: ZeroStack Private Cloud saves $510K over a three-year period in costs compared to AWS (in this $400K annual AWS infrastructure spend example). In addition to the cost savings, ZeroStack cloud provides 4-6x better performance for applications and controls to IT for automated resource management. Also, it is much easier to troubleshoot any application performance issues on ZeroStack as compared to public clouds due to much better visibility for hypervisor-level stats and VM placement across hosts. With all other competitive private cloud solutions (VMware, Nutanix etc.), almost inevitably a team of IT staff is needed to deploy, manage, run and operate the cloud. These vendors provide certifications to train people to run their software and hardware infrastructure. Get private cloud as a service. An on-premises cloud managed by ZeroStack using intelligent software and cloud-based proactive-support. IT teams have to constantly learn more complex technologies and spend a lot of time just keeping the lights on. That cost alone can go as high as $500K per year for a 20-server deployment, assuming 2-3 cloud experts, making these a prohibitively expensive and time consuming alternative to ZeroStack. ZeroStack eliminates all operational complexity using automated SaaS-based monitoring, operations, and ongoing maintenance and support of an on-premises ZeroStack Private Cloud deployment. To learn more on how to achieve this, head on over to to request a zero-cost, no obligation, 30-day POC. 6