Get the most from your public cloud with the right infrastructure decisions
As a fast, easy alternative for compute and storage resources, the public cloud practically sells itself: it requires no large up-front capital expenditures, its pay-per-usage model delivers the speed and agility to get to market fast, and it’s ideal for hosting short-term or trial content. What’s more, leading cloud environments are optimized for reliable performance on Intel® technology for the data center.
A wide selection of cloud provider options – including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud – provide you with lots of instance options to choose from. And we do mean lots.
All too often, however, organizations make the same mistake: they commit to a signed contract before fully exploring or understanding the variety of infrastructure options and instances available for public cloud that would help them best leverage this potent data center resource. Some might erroneously perceive one chip as the same as another, when in fact they are not. At a moment when choosing the right option is key, they may oversimplify and underestimate the value of choosing a public cloud instance that best matches their intended workloads. Instead, they might be drawn to whatever happens to resemble something familiar. Infrastructure and instances might be last-minute considerations for public cloud – when they should be first.
Presidio emphasizes the importance of rethinking your approach to public cloud, and ensuring that you understand and choose the right infrastructure to support it – to fully address business needs, maximize return on investment (ROI) and work more effectively. We would like to share some important considerations when weighing your public cloud alternatives.
Presidio takes a methodical approach to evaluating public cloud choices
Presidio believes that choosing the correct instance type and the underlying infrastructure technologies are vital to deriving the most value from public cloud. In most public cloud offerings, you have a choice between numerous instance types, all of which also use different supporting infrastructure technologies and generations of Intel® platforms. For that reason, it’s essential to take the time and truly understand all the factors that should drive your decision. Doing so can save you money and improve performance by making sure you are on the generation of Intel platform that best matches your workload. But, it means getting it right the first time, before making a potentially costly long-term commitment.
In Presidio’s advisory role, we start with an assessment or workshop to gather as much information as possible about your data center environment. We take into account:
- Your workloads, and what they’re most pressing requirements are – for example, low latency, storage, rapid scaling or other operational needs.
- Your existing relationships and how licensing considerations might affect your choice. For example, if you’re already a Microsoft-based environment, you might want to explore Microsoft Azure; or, if your environment is education, consider migrating to Google Cloud.
- How you prioritize cost versus performance. Some organizations are seeking the most economical solution while others regard the gains in compute/storage capabilities as a worthwhile investment.
In the end, Presidio’s role comes down to helping customers achieve the greatest value – maximizing the amount of work produced for each dollar spent – resulting in lower TCO and greater return on investment (ROI).
How you respond to these considerations provides the starting point for identifying your best solution.
Presidio can help identify the right cloud instance for you
By working with customers early on in their selection process, Presidio is able to help drill down to the most beneficial instance type from hundreds of options, and advise on the most appropriate Intel® processor and other technologies to support the best public cloud solution.
As mentioned earlier, your choice of public cloud instance will be driven largely by the workloads that will run on it. Just a few of the broad categories of instances, optimized by use cases, might include:
- General purpose – A balance of compute, memory and networking resources applicable to a range of common workloads. General purpose instances are ideal for applications that consume these resources in similar proportions.
- Compute optimized – Compute-intensive workloads such as high-performance computing (HPC), data lakes, and network appliances.
- Memory optimized – Workloads include high-performance databases, virtualization, and in-memory databases.
- Storage optimized – Offering high input/output operations per second (IOPS) at low cost.
- Accelerated computing – For accelerated workloads such as machine learning and 3D rendering
Many options are available within every instance and the choices can seem overwhelming, but choosing the best performer for the budget is instrumental to getting the optimum benefit from the public cloud. Presidio can help you make that determination.
The key to optimum performance: the right infrastructure and supporting Intel® technologies
One reason Intel is a key technology partner of Presidio is its decades-long leadership role in hyperscaling the world’s top cloud service providers (CSPs). In areas ranging from HPC to workload privacy, intelligent connectivity and performance acceleration, Intel technologies lie at the heart of virtually every CSP instance – and it’s important for cloud customers to know about the underlying technologies that power their cloud instances.
Some organizations mistakenly believe that “a core is a core,” failing to appreciate the performance gains, energy reduction and other generation-over-generation improvements. In fact, choosing an instance that features the latest Intel technologies can actually be a smart investment with dramatic impact on cloud performance:
- 2nd gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors provide the latest platform for cloud-optimized, 5G-ready networks and next-gen virtual networks, with higher per-core performance and up to 56 cores for data analytics and other compute-intensive workloads.
- Intel® Optane™ persistent memory reinvents the traditional memory/storage hierarchy by introducing true nonvolatile memory capabilities so that data remains persistent, while also enabling a faster recovery time and better availability. For cloud customers, this allows for larger instance sizes at a lower cost.
- Intel® Optane™ SSDs
Here are a few instance examples with comparable performance metrics:
Or, consider these significant savings from instance changes:
It should be noted that these represent today’s breakthrough Intel technologies available for public cloud instances – but what if “breakthrough” is not necessarily what you need? What if earlier-gen capabilities would provide a perfectly acceptable solution at a fraction of the cost? Helping you make that determination of best return on investment is where a trusted advisor like Presidio brings value.
For optimum price/performance, give your cloud infrastructure the attention it deserves
The public cloud is not a “set it and forget it” commodity, nor should the choice of a public cloud infrastructure and instance be made lightly without a complete understanding of your options. Your choice of public cloud instance and the Intel technologies that support it should be more than an afterthought – these are critical factors that should be assessed early on. They could spell the difference between achieving a 4X performance gain, or suffering a 4X increase in cost per workload.
Which option best represents the ideal balance of present and future performance need and return on investment? Presidio recommends testing and benchmarking instance options before making any commitment – and, we can help you determine the right combination of factors.
Plan for the right public cloud solution. Contact Presidio to learn more, or to schedule a workshop or assessment.
