Dynamic Cloud-Costing Service

Romonet, recognized for its data center TCO, engineering and performance modeling software has for many years worked with and for service providers that own or operate their own data centers. Romonet’s software and services have until now been primarily focused on assisting those operators minimize TCO whilst maximizing the technical performance of their sites.

Zahl Limbuwala, CEO of Romonet said: “In the last few weeks one of the major promises of cloud computing has visibly started to come true. The spate of price cuts triggered by Google and mirrored by Amazon and Microsoft has effectively halved the cost of the cloud’s most popular services. This is good news for users of cloud compute services and not so good news for Cloud providers that aren’t yet at Google or Amazon scale. Cloud is the commoditization of IT services and that means more price wars and a race to deliver at industrial scale and low unit cost; for everyone involved in this delivery chain it means shrinking margins and potentially small differences between being profitable and being history.”

He added, “Other cloud providers who plan to stay in the game and compete in this market need to have accurate and timely data on their delivery cost, margin and marginal cost of delivering another unit. This why the timing was right to launch our Cloud Costing service.”

“We’ve launched this service based upon our tried and tested predictive cost modeling engine, so it allows us to provide IaaS and PaaS providers with a dynamic, fully-loaded unit cost per delivered IT kWh or per server taking all the forcing factors into account; even climate, which can have a major influence in modern data center operating costs. This will enable these providers to ensure they price their capacity appropriately both to ensure that they are competitive and to know what the margin will be on each transaction before they commit.”

“Trying to compete by matching the low market price in the cloud market without being able to predict actual delivery costs accurately is a recipe for financial disaster. The Romonet Cloud Costing Service is the only way to assess future, dynamic costs of delivery,” commented Limbuwala. “We’ve already seen a huge range of delivery costs from the data centers we’ve modelled, ranging from < $0.10 per IT kWh ($0.01 per virtual server hour) up to > $1.50 per IT kWh ($0.15 per virtual server hour)”

The new service builds on top of Romonet’s existing software and services, leveraging their expertise and experience in the predictive cost-modeling arena.
The service is available immediately directly from Romonet and will become available via its managed services partners in the coming months.