CLOUD TO CO-LOCATION MIGRATION
A COST VERSUS BENEFIT CASE STUDY
Our Cloud to Co-location Migration Saved Our Client $1.5 Million Over a 5 Year Period.
The Problem:
Our client's CFO asked us to come in & analyze their information technology infrastructure & expense. Their apps & data were being hosted by a 3rd party Cloud provider in Las Vegas. They were having many problems with their environment including slowness, connectivity problems, & servers going down. Their desktop ticket count was being sustained, on average, at 150 tickets.
Their Cloud hosting expense was $32,000 per month.
How We Helped
The client had 4 manufacturing plants in two states so an on premise solution was not ideal. We recommended purchasing a state of the art, 3 server cluster solution to be hosted at a local data center which was best in class.
The cluster provided redundancy with 24/7/365 uptime. The co-lo gave them 24/7/365 uptime with redundant Internet & electricity in a secure facility. The local datacenter we recommended is where Cloud providers host their servers.
Their monthly expense went from $32,000/month to $1,450/month. The cost of the cluster & the rack buildout in the co-location facility was $282,817 which included labor. Our solution, the hardware & software, has a useful life of 5+ years.
Cloud to Co-location Facility Savings
Annual Cloud Hosting Fee $384,000
Hardware & Software Investment $282,817
Annual Co-lo fees $17,400
Savings 1st Year $83,783
Savings 2nd-5th Year $366,600 per year
Total Savings for 5 Years $1,550,183
Desktop Support Issues Resolved
We deep dived into their environment & their tickets eventually went from a sustained 150 tickets down to 30 tickets on average. The ongoing problems our engineers solved:
Citrix Problems:
We resolved the largest problem of consistent slowness by upgrading their Citrix servers to the latest version. We also increased the number of servers from 16 to 28, & increased the RAM on each server from 8 GB to 24GB. For power users, we provided dedicated Citrix servers.
Internet Speed:
We upgraded all 4 of their locations Internet speed to 1GB. Some locations only had 20MB. And we provided redundant 100MB Internet lines with an automated failover.
Virtual Server Corruption on Main Drive:
Their main drive was 9TB & had underlying corruption. We migrated their data to 2 (ea) fresh Microsoft Windows Server 2022 instances.
Printer problems:
We added more resources to the print servers & updated the print drivers.
Excel Power User:
After the Citrix upgrades, this power user continued to have problems with Excel slowness. Our engineer looked at the Excel spreadsheet & determined that the spreadsheet was so large & complex, that every time she added data, it was calculating the entire spreadsheet. It was switched to calculate manually only.
Further Accomplishments
For a disaster recovery/business continuity solution, we replicated their servers to a Cloud-based solution for $4,000/year;
Their 3 physical server cluster are being monitored 24/7/365 with a cloud-based system for $60/month;
Their 44 virtual machines are monitored, for a one time configuration fee, with a Nagios solution that is constantly tuned & upgraded for additional monitoring points.
If your business is being excessively charged for Cloud services, please contact us.