CloudPhysics have been a little quiet over the past twelve or so months with focus shifting from presenting data via Cards to Dashboards and also focusing on delivering on boarding solutions for managed service provider partners that has resulted in their channel business growing successfully. Before VMworld they announced the release of their Cost Calculator for Private Clouds in addition to releasing a couple more dashboards for their SaaS based landing page as well as adding a tagging feature for VMs and other objects.
CloudPhysics roots is all about data science and what can be achieved with literally billions of data points…so it’s no surprise that they are starting to put that front and center when it come to their new feature capabilities. Rightsizing at the 99th and 95th percentile usually cuts off the top 5% or 1% of metric peaks, and then presents the data at the nearest metric rate. In this way infrequent peaks are ignored, and the data is better suited to making decisions against. Now CloudPhysics rightsizing can be applied with intelligence to virtual machines and compute/storage infrastructure and capture savings by reducing workloads to match actual demands and reduce over provisioning.
The CloudPhysics Cost Calculator for Private Cloud lets you apply basic costing models to determine your actual costs per virtual machine (VM) in terms of power, compute resources, memory, storage, licensing, and more to generate a cost baseline.
As you can see below the new Card gives you the option to enter in cost points for most input items in a typical private cloud situation. They have not only included standard costs of servers hardware, memory and storage but also given you options to enter in depreciation terms, hypervisor cost details, environment costs relating to power and cooling but also additional 3rd party license costs that could be used for backup or acceleration software.
Once entered in you can filter through your platform as seen by the CloudPhysics Observer and get an understanding of what each individual VM is costing you in relation to your inputs. You also get a Cost as Configured amount that can be adjusted for the 99th and 95th percentile as well.
This view really gives you an understanding of what VMs are costing you the most and then get an idea of how to plan for any move to a public cloud where rightsizing based on more than just maximums is key. There is an option to click on the Compare Cloud Costs button which takes you to a new sister Card that displays the side by side cost of hosting your private cloud on AWS or Azure and again lets you manipulate the data with rightsizing.
In talking with the CloudPhysics team I’m hopeful that they will add to this card to include vCloud Air Network service providers running vSphere based IaaS platforms. I’m sure the 4000 odd vCAN SPs would appreciate a direct comparison for potential new customers looking to make a choice between the hyperscalers and their on platforms.
New Dashboard Items and Tags:
As mentioned in the opening paragraph CloudPhysics also added a couple new dashboards that can be configured to look at a number of different VM and Host metrics and show a trend over the last one, seven for thirty days. These new dashboard items as shown below are extremely handy for being bale to pick up problem objects in your infrastructure.
Also added is the basic ability to add Tags to VMs for easier searching from withing the CloudPhysics interface. In future these will be possibly integrated with vSphere tags which would be a welcome feature as more and more people are implementing tags for Storage Based Policy Management and Backup Management.
All in all another great set of enhancements to the CloudPhysics platform and I can tell you all that you need to keep an eye on what the team has in store for the next 6-12 months as I believe they are ready to take their offering to the next level and expand well and truly beyond anything they have done up to this point.
They have a free edition which you can tryout here: CloudPhysics Free Edition
Additional Content:
Chris Schin from goes through some of the new features during VMworld.
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