Bryan Semple

As more and more private clouds are deployed, organizations will face the requirement to implement chargeback or at least show back. Key to implementing chargeback is setting the chargeback rate. Much as pricing significantly impacts a public cloud provider, for the private cloud provider, the chargeback rate has significant implications. This article examines three strategies for setting prices for private cloud operators. Setting Prices Public cloud operators, or for that matter any business selling a product, set pricing based on the pricing triangle. The triangle contains three key balance points for pricing a product: Product or Service Cost - unless you are selling something as a loss leader, price is generally set above cost. The greater the delta between cost and price, the higher the margins. Determining the cost of IT services can be challenging but, in ge... (more)

Five Capacity Management Challenges for Private Clouds

Organizations that are seeking to deploy cloud-based business models for their infrastructure face unique capacity management challenges. This article will review these challenges to enable cloud providers, either public or private, to avoid the pitfalls of improper capacity management.  While the article discusses both types of clouds, the needs of private cloud providers will be especially highlighted due to the unique challenges they face with this business model. IT Becomes a Business within a Business For years, we have been hearing "IT must behave more like a business." A ... (more)

Requirements for Capacity Management in Virtual Environments

Any data center with a virtualized environment has a real need for effective capacity management. This article discusses the reasons why capacity management is critical to achieving the benefits of server virtualization and outlines the three key requirements to consider when evaluating capacity management systems. Why Capacity Management in Virtualized Environments A major advantage of virtualized environments is their ability to improve resource utilization by running multiple virtual machines (VMs) on the physical servers in a shared infrastructure. With such an architecture, ... (more)