NaviCloud Sphere. NaviCloud Pricing and Billing: By Resource Utilization, at the 95th Percentile. A Time Warner Cable Company.

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1 NaviCloud Sphere NaviCloud Pricing and Billing: By Resource Utilization, at the 95th Percentile June 29, 2011 A Time Warner Cable Company

2 NaviCloud Sphere Pricing, Billing: By Resource Utilization, at 95th Percentile NaviSite prices virtual environments in its NaviCloud Sphere platform on a resource utilization model rather than on any traditional packaged model for virtual machines. Typical traditional VM packages suffer from the following drawbacks: Based on specific configurations, e.g. 1 vcpu, 2 GB RAM, 100 GB HD. May be priced by the hour. Priced per VM. NaviCloud s pricing model provides clear advantages in building out and maintaining IT infrastructure: All resources are metered at an aggregate level. Priced at 95th percentile peak for the month. Resources are based on aggregate values, not on individual VMs. The remainder of this document offers details about NaviCloud pricing and examples of how it looks and works to provide the benefits of virtualization and lower total cost of ownership. Resource Utilization Typically, servers use only 5-15% of a physical CPU and 10-30% of allotted physical memory. Virtualization allows cloud service providers to take advantage of those utilization levels by putting multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical machine, and resources are used more efficiently. By selling packages of virtual CPUs and memory, a cloud service provider is stating that a single machine may go up to a full utilization level, but is counting on the law of averages to keep it from happening consistently. Under such a package pricing model, cloud computing customers pay for the full resource amount on that VM, even if they don t use it. By charging only for resources actually consumed, NaviSite enables NaviCloud customers to share in reaping the benefits of virtualization. So whether a single VM consumes all of a 2.5 GHz processor, or five VMs consume only.5 GHz each, NaviSite s pricing model calls for charging the same amount. NaviCloud s resource utilization pricing gives customers a greater degree of control over expenses. Servers with low resource utilization cost less; more compute-intensive applications cost more. (Very compute intensive applications may actually cost less on a physical platform.) No matter what, the customer truly pays only for resources consumed. The following scenario illustrates a hypothetical example of what four VMs may cost under the two very different pricing models. In the packaged model, a cloud customer would pay for four machines with a single vcpu in each. Each virtual CPU is capable of 2.5 GHz of processing, but because of varied business functions, the spikes happen at different times. The CPU utilization may look like the following: NaviSite NaviCloud Sphere NaviCloud Pricing and Billing Model 29-June-2011 Page 2

3 Figure 1: Example vcpu usage Rather than charge full price for each CPU, NaviCloud tracks the aggregate utilization of the whole environment and charges at the 95 th percentile. In this example, that would be just under 3 GHz. Figure 2: NaviCloud vcpu aggregation Aggregate For a direct comparison of the two models, it would be tempting to take the 2.5GHz maximum for each VM and multiply by four, but that would vastly over-estimate the true usage. For this reason, NaviCloud customers can set a conservative baseline for pricing at the initiation of a contract and then adjust the commit level on a monthly basis to meet actual requirements. This adjustability also allows for increases due to seasonal requirements, and decreases when the period of higher consumption has ended. NaviSite NaviCloud Sphere NaviCloud Pricing and Billing Model 29-June-2011 Page 3

4 95th Percentile Aggregate Billing Details Just what are the methods employed in NaviCloud to facilitate utilization pricing at the 95 th percentile? The following details and examples provide a closer look. Resources are measured every 5 minutes. Total consumption is calculated for each time interval. Highest 5% is discarded. Next highest value is the billing level. All resource pricing is based on aggregate usage: CPU Aggregate CPU usage across all VMs. Memory Aggregate memory usage across all VMs. Storage Total storage consumed by active and inactive VMs, templates, and snapshots. Example Data Five VMs, Twenty Intervals Here is an example that employs usage numbers for five VMs over a 95 minute period. Usage is Measured NaviCloud meters computing resource usage: Figure 3: Five VMs, 20 intervals, 95 minutes VM5 12: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : NaviSite NaviCloud Sphere NaviCloud Pricing and Billing Model 29-June-2011 Page 4

5 Data is Aggregated NaviCloud aggregates the consumed resource numbers: Figure 4: Overall usage aggregation VM Exclude the highest 5% NaviCloud discards the high value; bills for consumed resources at 95 th percentile. Highest value (166 at 12:55) is discarded. Next highest value (82 at 13:10) is the bill rate. Figure 5: Resource aggregation after high-value discard VM5 NaviSite NaviCloud Sphere NaviCloud Pricing and Billing Model 29-June-2011 Page 5

6 Actual Scale A summary of what is measured and how: CPU is measured in GHz; memory and disk storage in GB; bandwidth in Mbps. Approximately 8640 samples per month. 432 intervals (36 hours) discarded. The more VMs, the more steady aggregate utilization becomes. In Sum NaviCloud customers pay only for the computing resources they use, at pricing rationally calculated below the top usage tier. They exercise greater control over computing expenses by scaling resources up and down as business needs dictate. They create as much virtual IT infrastructure as their business necessitates without having to worry about incurring unnecessary costs for servers with lower utilization levels. * * * * * NaviSite NaviCloud Sphere NaviCloud Pricing and Billing Model 29-June-2011 Page 6