Converged Infrastructure Price Comparison

Converged infrastructure solutions offer pre-configured, pre-optimised and scalable components that include hardware, software and installation services...Essentially Cloud-in-a-box.

Here is example of VCE vBlock 240:
http://www.vce.com/products/converged/vblock/system-200
http://www.vce.com/asset/documents/vblock-240-gen3-1-architecture-overview.pdf


Unfortunately converged infrastructure is expensive when you consider resource costs to manage infrastructure and data centre costs. Private cloud lacks services that allow projects to be deployed quickly, services the big public cloud providers offer such as:

• Database as a service (RDS/DynamoDB/Elasticache)
• Desktop as a Service - VDI (Workspaces)
• Load Balancing (ELB)
• Autoscaling
• DNS (Route 53)
• Monitoring (Cloudwatch)
• Message Queing Service (SQS)
• Email Service (SES)
• Hadoop (Elastic MapReduce)
• Content Delivery Network (Cloudfront)
• Autoscaling infrastructure to meet application demand (Auto scale group)
• Scalability (huge instances like c4.8xlarge - 36vCPUs)
• Billing per VM
• Everything can be software defined through APIs

Here is a price comparison of major converged infrastructure:
http://www.valueprism.com/resources/whitepaper/Dell%20HCS%20for%20Microsoft%20CPS%20Standard%20Price%20Performance%20Whitepaper.pdf

  * Please note above prices can potentially double once you consider resource costs to manage infrastructure and data centre costs

 

For comparison let us check AWS costs per VM for 3 years in US-East region - Total cost = $1,452:
      - Reserved instance for 3 years - c3.large (2 vCPUs/3.75GB memory) = $1,020.00
      - EBS standard magnetic volume - 240GB = $432.00