I’ve been off the radar in recent weeks as things around 6fusion have been busy, but few weeks ago we blogged about the Profiler application we’ve been working on. I’ve just come up for a bit of air on the project but while I was in the thick of things we unearthed an interesting sample of real life, multi-faceted, cloud impact. I thought it was worth sharing and my IT Director friend at the company I’m about to tell you about said it was ok to share a tidbit with the world (Special thanks, S.).

Before I get into some of the details of this post, let me give you a little snapshot of the Enterprise operation we’ve been working with:

• Location: Caribbean/Latin America
• Industry: Financial Services
• Data Centers Operated: One internal/One co-lo
• Main Challenges: The client faced infrastructure budget restrictions, which stresses application time to production cycles. In addition, the customer needed to reduce the cost of protecting mission critical systems without compromising their established RPOs and RTOs. Most importantly, certain data and applications could not be operated in North America for compliance/regulatory reasons.

Like many IT leaders today, the IT Director of this company was looking to the cloud to potentially address their business requirements.

Using 6fusion’s Profiler technology currently in controlled beta, the customer was able to determine a projected cloud computing cost application by application across their enterprise. Here is a snapshot of their live data output:

What we find intriguing about the report capabilities we’ve enabled is that we are helping the customer cross the cloud chasm by using dollars and cents as the vessel. We believe the price to value ratio trumps even the most innovative of technologies in almost every purchasing decision. So it stands to reason that if you can’t tell a customer ‘what it costs’, you are pretty much just selling to yourself.

Cloud computing is no different.

Newly armed with valuable information about the cost of running their EXISTING production applications in active and passive states in the cloud, the IT Director could make confident business decisions that not only met his technical objectives, but also the objectives in his counterparts in the Finance Dept.

An interesting observation about integrating 6fusion into the enterprise is that our technology helps to blur the line between public and private cloud infrastructure. By turning the client’s own infrastructure into a self-contained cloud (or private cloud) using the same algorithm that powers our public cloud offering, we can effectively create a permanent economic bridge between the two environments (and like a real bridge, it can support free-flowing two-way traffic).

So here is how this individual client is using this economic bridge to drive cloud migration priorities for their organization: They identified a set of workloads they urgently need infrastructure to perform vital test and dev processes. Inexpensively and safely, they can operate those workloads in cost-reduced resources located in the U.S. Next, they identified two mission critical systems – Exchange and SQL – that they can duplicate leveraging the public cloud infrastructure located in the Caribbean/Latin America region. This is critical for the customer because things like email and databases must remain in certain jurisdictions only (excluding the U.S).  This issue transcends many enterprise cloud deployment scenarios and the subject has is getting a lot of coverage lately.

The end result for the client:

• They achieve public cloud leverage at a financial pace they can handle out of the gate and in the future
• They effectively doubled their data center footprint to include utility resources located in the U.S and Caribbean/Latin America regions
• Because of the ability to cloud profile, they can make periodic future cloud migration decisions in lock step with the constraints put on by the Finance Dept
• With a cloud profile, they know cloud costs well before they spend time and resources tapping into and testing a public cloud
• They maintained data residency integrity – a crucial show stopper for any cloud consideration in the past
• They have a public cloud infrastructure that runs both their web oriented apps as well as their line-of-business apps, eliminating the need for cloud-silos.

The future for this client, like many others we’ve begun to collaborate with in recent months, is rooted now in cloud efficiency. Here are some of the questions 6fusion and its partners will help address for IT operations:

• How can I make my current production applications scale more efficiently so that I can reduce my cloud costs prior to migration?
• How far can I push the public / private cloud integration envelope?
• Using the cloud like a pure utility, what workloads can I power down during off peak to shrink my cost footprint?
• How do my applications in cloud perform against category benchmarks from 6fusion’s ecosystem?

UC6 Profiler is in beta. If you’ve got an interesting set of business circumstances and a serious need to contain or reduce your or your customer’s IT Ops costs, give us a holler.