Predicting cloud storage costs with HPE InfoSight

[StorageExperts]

Keeping hybrid IT simple: Learn more about the ways HPE storage tools help you to predict and manage your cloud storage costs—including the Cloud Volume Sizing tool that’s part of HPE InfoSight.

Ask anyone who’s using the cloud and they’ll tell you this is one of their biggest issues: controlling costs. Case in point, there are dozens of cloud monitoring and cost management solutions trying to reign in cloud spend.

It’s the double-edged sword of the cloud closed box. On one hand, you just sign up to a price per gigabyte and an SLA. It’s simple, like a closed box. You don’t need to worry about what happens underneath the covers. On the other hand, you can’t see what’s going on and costs start to spiral out of control.

HPE storage provides you multiple ways to predict and manage your cloud storage costs:

1. Real-time cloud storage estimates

Cloud storage users get real-time predictive cost estimates when they create new cloud storage volumes on the HPE Cloud Volumes portal. Select the GB, performance, and SLA you need and your cost estimate pops up BEFORE you pay for it. (See Figure 1.) Good luck getting any useful estimates beforehand (let alone real-time estimates) with most cloud providers—other than using some online clunky guesstimate calculator that may not reflect your actual usage.

                                                         Figure 1: HPE Cloud Volumes portal – Real-time cost estimates

2. Cloud replication/migration estimates

Most customers are building out hybrid IT environments. That means you may want to know how much it will cost to move datasets A, B, and C or App X, Y, and Z from on-premises to the cloud. Now you can do that with our new Infosight Labs Cloud Volumes Sizing Tool.

This tool is unlike most cloud estimator tools that only use broad stroke estimates where you manually enter your datasets and apps to provide an estimate. Instead, our Cloud Volumes Sizing Tool allows you to select real live data from the specific array(s), volume(s), or application(s) you are running on-premises to analyze. It then helps translate those to costs in the cloud. No more guestimations. Instead, you get accurate predictions on what your cloud storage costs will be when moving data from your on-premises storage to HPE Cloud Volumes.  Simply select the array(s), application(s), and/or volume(s) you want to replicate to cloud and the tool does the rest.

                                                    Figure 2: HPE InfoSight - Cloud Volumes Sizing Tool

HPE Cloud Volumes Sizing Tool—it’s free and easy

More importantly, the HPE Cloud Volumes Sizing Tool is free to all HPE Nimble customers—just like everything else with HPE InfoSight. You don’t even need a cloud account or access to HPE Cloud Volumes to estimate what your cloud costs would be BEFORE you move anything to cloud. 

So, we would like invite all our customers to login to HPE InfoSight, go to the Labs tab, and take the HPE Cloud Volumes Sizing Tool for a spin.

In living up to the motto of making hybrid IT simple, we want to take most of the guesswork out of using and moving to the cloud. The goal of Infosight and HPE’s growing line of Cloud Ready Storage offerings is to provide easy data mobility between on-premises and cloud—while delivering visibility and oversight to where your data is and how much it is costing you. 

What has your cloud provider done for you lately?

Ready to learn more?

HPE Cloud Volumes

HPE InfoSight

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Meet Around the Storage Block blogger Doug Ko, HPE Storage. Doug is responsible for cloud strategy and go-to-market at HPE. His expertise is in data storage and cloud computing and he is interested in the role of cloud in enabling digital transformation in enterprises and service providers.