Right sizing scenarios for optimizing cloud business cases

A critical aspect of every cloud transformation is to correctly size required cloud resources. Whether you are building a business case before a cloud migration, or defining migration plans for individual business applications, it is important to understand current specifications of servers, virtual machines, containers, storage, databases, etc. and the actual utilization of those IT components.

In our latest product release (version 41), we have added a couple of new preferences around right sizing, in order to let you simulate impact of important criteria on your cloud migration scenarios. For instance: different right sizing margins or safety factors.

Figure 1. Adjustments on right sizing for CPU core utilization, while memory is assumed a fixed utilization.

Figure 1 shows an example of scaling factors settings for CPU core and memory. There is also an additional setting for storage type IT assets. The settings allow you to individually specify to:

• Consider right sizing factors, as they are typically captured and ingested from hypervisors, monitoring solutions, CMDBs, etc.
• Or to ignore any captured right sizing factors, but instead apply fixed default factors.

When building a cloud migration scenario, this helps you consider all the right-sizing factors for your IT assets. Using this information, the platform will automatically generate migration recommendations with the best-suited cloud services for your situation.

As right sizing factors usually reflect over-time averages or 95th percentile data, it is a best practice to add some margin on top. This helps to account for peak utilizations that are not visible in the data and provide some safety.

Another possibility is to let Txture override all captured right sizing factors by fixed ones in order to establish broader cost comparisons for theoretical over- or undersized estates.

This feature of configuring effective scaling factors for CPU cores, memory and storage is available both in Txture Business Case Builder and Txture Cloud Transformation modules and influences the mapping of as-is on-prem/cloud assets to potential cloud replacements.

Figure 2. Example cloud service mapping where a margin of 20% gets added on top of a 16% utilization of CPU cores (measured 95th percentile data over a month) and a fixed assumption of 75% of memory utilization.

Figure 3. Txture generated business cases with one taking original right sizing factors into account (left) and one with 20% added margin for some resource safety (right).

Txture is your end-to-end solution for cloud transformation planning. Leverage this new functionality and plenty of other useful automations for laying out a cloud strategy with confidence.

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