The enterprise CIO's world has changed. They are constantly being asked:
“What is our Cloud strategy?”
There are three reasons why CIO’s are on the receiving end of this tough question:
1) Everyone, including your company’s CFO is now using Cloud for her personal music collection. She’s done the math, she’s seen the ease-of-use.
2) Product development cycles are shrinking due to competition. Waiting for compute time to become available feels so old-school.
3) GPU’s, FPGA’s, faster network interconnects are too hard for the IT team to catch up with. Cloud providers take these novel technologies out of the IT team’s ever expanding To-Do list and put it in the hands of the users.
Cloud HPC benefits go beyond Cost Savings. But that doesn’t mean we understand how to articulate the cost savings.
I was talking to a colleague, CIO of a large research organization, today. He is facing questions from his board about his high performance computing strategy. The questions revolve around use of Cloud. While exchanging ideas about related cost savings, I recalled a recent case study:
“Jellyfish pays freelance artists roughly $300 a day, and having five artists idle while a rendering job is in progress costs the studio $1,500 a day”.
They were able to cut the waste by deploying on-demand compute nodes using Azure Batch.
It so easy to miss “hours and hours of paid coffee-breaks” in the ROI discussion for Cloud HPC. To really understand the ROI and TCO of Cloud HPC requires an analytical approach and knowledge of the obvious and subtle costs. Refer to a previous blog post about The 7 Myths of Cloud for Engineers for some detail on a better approach to TCO.
Want to know how Cloud HPC can benefit your business? Contact us for a consulation.
