Getting Some Prices

We have come a long way on our journey toward getting on the cloud. We have inventoried our existing computing power, anticipated our moving costs and analyzed whether we should even move to the cloud. Now it's time to compare costs and how we will manage our computing power on the cloud.

Remember what we know about our computing power. We need it when searching for prices.

           Disk:           RAM:                 CPU:

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Server 1:  C: 20, D: 20 -- 2 GB (2.99 Ghz)   -- 5160 XEON - 3.00 GHz
Server 2:  C: 8         -- 2 GB (2.99 Ghz)   -- 5160 XEON - 3.00 GHz
Server 3:  C: 14        -- 1 GB (3.00 Ghz)   -- 5160 XEON - 3.00 GHz
Server 4:  C: 20, D: 30 -- 3.5 GB (3.00 Ghz) -- 5160 XEON - 3.00 GHz
Bandwidth: 5 minute peak  In: 0.9 MB   Out: 6.4 MB

All Windows Servers and we have licenses.

-- A small warning -- My analysis confirms that there are no simple ways to select the right cloud vendor. It is currently a daunting challenge, but it is worth the effort.

I have chosen to explore the following cloud vendors:

• Amazon Elastic Web Services (EC2)
• Rackspace Cloud
• Go Grid
• Windows Azure
• NJVC FedRamp government cloud
• iWeb
• SkyTap

Each of these vendors seems to have at least a part of my solution.

I will explore my experience with each one in succeeding posts.

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Next Post: Getting Pricing Is Slow
 

Additional resources:

Thinking Out Cloud          Cloud Storage - Pricing and Features          Cloud Pricing War Begins