Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Cost Governance Solution for Nutanix Private Cloud

Organizations today are increasingly adopting robust private cloud architectures to gain the necessary agility and flexibility needed for IT teams to quickly fulfill business needs. However, as private cloud environments scale, there is a need for a cost governance solution that centralizes visibility to keep overall IT spending within budgets. Another key cost governance challenge in private clouds has historically been the lack of immediate visibility into granular resource costs. There are many different cost factors to consider, beyond simply hardware and software infrastructure licenses, when evaluating the true cost of owning and running a private cloud. Lastly, to drive financial accountability, IT Ops teams need the ability to charge back spending to specific business units with a unified private cloud cost report.

PRIVATE CLOUD COST METERING 

In order to get visibility into the true cost of various private cloud resources (such as VMs, snapshots, storage volumes, etc.) you should account for all the cost factors that go into owning and running the data-center upon which a private cloud has been built.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO Model)

Get out-of-the-box cost visibility estimates using our proprietary Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model. The model aggregates six key categories:

• Hardware: Nutanix and third-party costs.
• Software: Virtualization and management software licenses.
• Facilities: Power, cooling, and physical datacenter footprint.
• Telecom: Network connectivity and switch infrastructure.
• Services: Support contracts and professional services.
• People: IT administrative staff overhead.

The TCO model is customizable at the individual cluster level. The key input parameter that the TCO model depends on is the number of nodes in a cluster. The overall cluster level TCO is then allocated to individual resources in that cluster (such as VMs) based on the amount of allocated capacity to a resource (such as CPU, memory and storage) in proportion to the total cluster level resources. With the TCO model configured accurately, you get out-of-the-box visibility into the cost of VMs and workloads running on your Nutanix private cloud. The same can be done for other resources like snapshots, storage volumes, and more.

User Defined Metering

While the default TCO model estimates costs based on hardware, software, facilities, and personnel assumptions, the User Defined Metering (UDM) feature provides manual control over pricing. UDM allows you to set unit rates for metering a customer's infrastructure, a feature which is particularly useful for Service Providers who already know their unit rates and want to charge their customers accordingly. Using UDM, you can define specific unit rates for various metrics, such as $/vCPU-hour, $/vRAM-hour, or $/vStorage-GiB. These rate cards serve as independent metrics that can be assigned to clusters.

Granular Visibility into Costs

Once a Private Cloud Cost Metering is specified, NCM Cost Governance provides robust reporting and analysis over a time that you choose. You can view consumption patterns and cost data through various analytical views, allowing you to pinpoint anomalies or cost drivers effectively.

PRIVATE CLOUD CHARGEBACK & BUDGETING

With applications and workloads increasingly moving to private clouds, it is critical to ensure that businesses can track and allocate spending across clouds using showback and chargeback reports. In order to drive financial accountability, it is essential to have reporting mechanisms that can identify and update resource costs. NCM Cost Governance provides a tag-based reporting structure that can be used to create highly granular cost reports and allocate spending to an appropriate business unit or cost center. However, not all resources can be or will be tagged. NCM Cost Governance allows you to set up manual chargeback rules for untagged spending. You can also set up budgets and track spending against those budgets so that you are proactively notified before spending goes out of control. Furthermore, it is important to highlight that showback visibility extends to the application level within the Nutanix Cloud Manager Self-Service Solution, which grants application owners precise insight into both resource consumption and associated expenditures.

ROBUST COST GOVERNANCE OF YOUR PRIVATE CLOUD

Projected costs can be surprisingly difficult for IT teams to estimate accurately for datacenter environments. With NCM Cost Governance, you receive an estimated total cost of ownership (TCO) model, allowing you to monitor resource consumption, create and track budgets, and implement chargeback or showback to increase accountability. 

NCM Cost Governance empowers IT leaders to transform their private cloud from a cost center into a transparent, efficient service provider. By bridging the gap between resource consumption and financial accountability, you can make smarter, data-driven decisions for your private cloud future.

Ready to see where your Nutanix spend is going? 

Visit nutanix.com/products/cloud-manager/cost-governance or explore our Test Drive to get started today.