Informing the On/Off-prem Cloud Discussion in Higher Education
Srijith Rajamohan, Robert E. Settlage · Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing · 2020
The proliferation of external vendors providing public cloud services has resulted in a push to migrate away from on-premise compute and storage resources. The desire to move capital costs to operational costs, promises of lower maintenance and operational costs, lower failure rates, and ease of use have all played a part. However, for larger organizations with recurring and predictable usage patterns it needs to be investigated whether an on-premise and dedicated computational cluster might indeed remain more appropriate and cost-efficient. In this work, we assess various typical use-cases and provide a Total Cost of Ownership calculator to compare the costs of an on-premise cloud with that of an external cloud vendor.