Economic Analysis of Infrastructure Operations

Ioannis Konstantinou (1) , Evangelos Floros (1)

1 GRNET - Greek Research and Technology Network S.A.

Cloud computing claims to offer multiple advantages compared to "traditional" computing infrastructures. These include: energy efficiency, reduction of the overall administration costs, and better utilization of hardware resources by co-hosting multiple service environments. This document reports on the experience gained during the provision of an IaaS cloud service in the context of the StratusLab project and provides quantitative economic analysis of the total cost of ownership of such infrastructure by calculating the infrastructure, maintenance and operational costs. The analysis continues with the cost comparison of the private cloud against Amazon's popular EC2 public cloud service by utilizing the collected StratusLab usage traces for a period of one year. It is shown that with an average utilization of 70%, a small cluster of 20 machines could amortize its total cost in a period of 2-3 years while offering the same rates as commercial cloud providers if it were offered on a pay-as-you go basis.

Domaines: Calcul parallèle, distribué et partagé [cs.DC]

Ioannis Konstantinou, Evangelos Floros. Economic Analysis of Infrastructure Operations. 2012. ⟨hal-00687211⟩