Category Archives: Factors that affect costs

  1. Home / 
  2. Archive by category "Factors that affect costs"
May 13, 2024
IBM System Storage – Introduction to Power E1080

1.6.4 IBM System Storage

The IBM System Storage Disk Systems products and offerings provide compelling storage solutions with superior value for all levels of business, from entry-level to high-end storage systems.

IBM Storage simplifies data infrastructure by using an underlying software foundation to strengthen and streamline the storage in the hybrid cloud environment, which uses a simplified approach to containerization, management, and data protection. For more information about the various offerings, see this web page.

The following section highlights a few of the offerings.

IBM FlashSystem Family

The IBM FlashSystem® family is a portfolio of cloud-enabled storage systems designed to be easily deployed and quickly scaled to help optimize storage configurations, streamline issue resolution, and lower storage costs.

IBM FlashSystem is built with IBM Spectrum® Virtualize software to help deploy sophisticated hybrid cloud storage solutions, accelerate infrastructure modernization, address security needs, and maximize value by using the power of AI. The products are designed to provide enterprise-grade functions without compromising affordability or performance. They also offer the advantages of end-to-end NVMe, the innovation of IBM FlashCore® technology, and SCM for ultra-low latency. For more information, see this web page.

IBM System Storage DS8000

IBM DS8900F is the next generation of enterprise data systems that are built with the most advanced Power processor technology and feature ultra-low application response times.

Designed for data-intensive and mission-critical workloads, DS8900F adds next-level performance, data protection, resiliency, and availability across hybrid cloud solutions through ultra-low latency, better than seven 9’s (99.99999) availability, transparent cloud, tiering, and advanced data protection against malware and ransomware. This enterprise class storage solution provides superior performance and higher capacity, which enables the consolidation of all mission critical workloads in one place.

IBM DS8900F can provide 100% data encryption at-rest, in-flight and in the cloud. This flexible storage supports IBM Power, IBM Z®, and IBM LinuxONE. For more information, see this web page.

IBM SAN Volume Controller

IBM SAN Volume Controller is an enterprise-class system that consolidates storage from over 500 IBM and third-party storage systems to improve efficiency, simplify management and operations, modernize storage with new capabilities, and enable a common approach to hybrid cloud regardless of storage system type.

IBM SAN Volume Controller provides a complete set of data resilience capabilities with high availability, business continuance, and data security features. Storage supports automated tiering with AI-based IBM Easy Tier® that can help improve performance at a lower cost. For more information, see this web page.

Chapter 1. Introduction to Power E1080        33

1.7 System racks

The Power E1080 server fits a standard 19-inch rack. The server is certified and tested in the IBM Enterprise racks (7965-S42, 7014-T42, 7014-T00, or 7965-94Y). Customers can choose to place the server in other racks if they are confident that those racks have the strength, rigidity, depth, and hole pattern characteristics that are needed. Contact IBM Support to determine whether other racks are suitable.

Order information: It is highly recommended that you order the Power E1080 server with an IBM 42U enterprise rack 7965-S42 feature. This rack provides a more complete and higher quality environment for IBM Manufacturing system assembly and testing, and provides a complete package.

If a system is installed in a rack or cabinet that is not from IBM, ensure that the rack meets the requirements that are described in 1.7.7, “Original equipment manufacturer racks” onpage 41.

Responsibility: The customer is responsible for ensuring the installation of the drawer in the preferred rack or cabinet results in a configuration that is stable, serviceable, safe, and compatible with the drawer requirements for power, cooling, cable management, weight, and rail security.

More Details
Jan 13, 2024
Original equipment manufacturer racks – Introduction to Power E1080

1.7.7 Original equipment manufacturer racks

The system can be installed in a suitable OEM rack if that the rack conforms to the EIA-310-D standard for 19-inch racks. This standard is published by the Electrical Industries Alliance. For more information, see IBM Documentation.

The IBM Documentation provides the general rack specifications, including the following information:

Ê The rack or cabinet must meet the EIA Standard EIA-310-D for 19-inch racks that was published August 24, 1992. The EIA-310-D standard specifies internal dimensions, for example, the width of the rack opening (width of the chassis), the width of the module mounting flanges, and the mounting hole spacing.

Ê The front rack opening must be a minimum of 450 mm (17.72 in.) wide, and the

rail-mounting holes must be 465 mm plus or minus 1.6 mm (18.3 in. plus or minus 0.06 in.) apart on center (horizontal width between vertical columns of holes on the two

front-mounting flanges and on the two rear-mounting flanges). Figure 1-13 is a top view showing the rack specification dimensions.

Figure 1-13 Rack specifications (top-down view)

Ê The vertical distance between mounting holes must consist of sets of three holes that are spaced (from bottom to top) 15.9 mm (0.625 in.), 15.9 mm (0.625 in.), and 12.7 mm (0.5 in.) on center, which makes each three-hole set of vertical hole spacing 44.45 mm

(1.75 in.) apart on center.

Chapter 1. Introduction to Power E1080        41

Figure 1-14 shows the vertical distances between the mounting holes.

Figure1–14 Vertical distances between mounting holes

Ê The following rack hole sizes are supported for racks where IBM hardware is mounted:

– 7.1 mm (0.28 in.) plus or minus 0.1 mm (round) – 9.5 mm (0.37 in.) plus or minus 0.1 mm (square)

The rack or cabinet must be capable of supporting an average load of 20 kg (44 lb.) of product weight per EIA unit. For example, a four EIA drawer has a maximum drawer weight of 80 kg (176 lb.).

More Details
Sep 12, 2023
Factors that affect costs – Azure Cost Planning and Management

Factors that affect costs

Each Azure consumption (usage)-based service has one or more usage meters that define the price rate and unit of cost. Depending on the service, there will be different units of costs.

Billing is performed monthly for each subscription based on resource consumption that’s collected from individual meters for that subscription. This means that every month, you may receive a different invoice based on a different set of costs incurred; maybe you consumed more on one resources meter, less on another, and created new resources that created costs against another meter.

The following are primary factors that can affect costs:

  • Purchasing model: The costs for resources may differ, depending on your purchase model. You can either purchase your Azure directly from Microsoft or through a Cloud Solution Provider (CSP): https://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/purchase-options.
  • Resource type: The costs are specific to your resources; each resource has a billing meter and cost unit. For example, data storage and data transfer will have a unit of billing of GB/month, a VM or Azure SQL database will have a unit of billing of 1 hour, and a premium SSD managed disk will have a unit of billing of 1/month. Storage accounts can charge for any read and write operations unless you’re using Premium, in which case these charges are not applicable. It is important to understand the billing units for each resource you create.
  • Location: The costs will vary between Azure regions.
  • Usage period: Some resources, such as VMs, can be shut down (de-allocated) to prevent running costs; two identical VMs running for different running hours will have different costs. You would continue to pay for storage costs, but you wouldn’t pay for data transfer costs while the VM is not passing network traffic. It is also worth noting that services such as Azure AD Domain Services, Azure Bastion, and the Azure VPN gateway service, once created, will still be billed even if they are not used; the only way to prevent costs for these services is to delete them.
  • Network traffic: Ingress data transfer (data entering or incoming) for an Azure Region or between resources within the same region is always free, but egress data transfer (data leaving or outgoing) from a region is billed at a per-GB unit; this is irrespective of the fact that this is internet traffic or that the region is using a VPN or ExpressRoute circuit.

Note that some resource types are free and have no billing meter or cost implications. The following are some examples of resources that can be created or enabled with no costs. Likewise, removing any of these will not reduce your costs or the invoice you receive:

  • User accounts or groups
  • Resource groups
  • Virtual networks
  • Virtual network peering
  • Network interfaces
  • Network security groups
  • Availability sets

It is important to understand what resources have cost implications and what resources don’t. In this section, we looked at factors that affect costs. In the next section, we’ll look at how to reduce costs.

More Details
Jun 12, 2023
Exercise 1 – using the Azure Pricing calculator – Azure Cost Planning and Management

Exercise 1 – using the Azure Pricing calculator

In this exercise, you will create a price estimate with the Azure Pricing calculator; the estimate will be for a simple single-instance Windows VM hosted in the North Europe (Dublin) region.

Task – accessing the Azure Pricing calculator

  1. Open a browser and sign into the Azure pricing calculator using your Microsoft account: https://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/calculator.

Task – adding a VM to the estimate

  1. From the products tab, click Virtual Machines.
  2. Scroll down to the VM line item that has been added to the estimate.
  3. Adjust the default VM settings to the following for this exercise (or as required):
    • Region: North Europe.
    • Operating System: Windows.
    • Type: (OS only).
    • Tier: Standard.
    • Category: General purpose.
    • Instance Series: Dds v4-series (or as required).
    • Instance: D2ds v4 (or as required).
    • Virtual Machines: Leave as qty of 1 and running for 730 hours.
  1. Leave Savings options as is.
  2. Expand Managed Disks and adjust the default settings to the following for this exercise:
    • Tier: Premium SSD
    • Disk Size: S15: 256 GiB
    • Disks (qty): 1
  1. Leave Storage Transactions as is.
  2. Expand Bandwidth and adjust the default settings to the following for this exercise:
    • Data transfer type: Internet egress
    • Source region: North Europe
    • Routed via: Microsoft Global Network
    • Outbound data transfer: 10 GiB
  1. Leave Support as is.
  2. Leave Programmes and Offers as is.
  3. From the bottom right of the estimate screen, set the currency as required.

Task – saving, exporting, and sharing the estimate

  1. From the bottom left of the Estimate screen, click Save as and enter a name for your estimate.
  2. You will see a message stating that the estimate has been saved and that it can be viewed by clicking on the Saved estimates tab. Click Done.
  3. To export the estimate, click Export.
  4. To share the estimate, click Share.

In this exercise, we created an estimate for an Azure resource to be used in a solution using the Azure Pricing calculator. In the next exercise, we will use the TCO calculator.

More Details
May 12, 2023
Exercise 2 – using the TCO calculator – Azure Cost Planning and Management

Exercise 2 – using the TCO calculator

This exercise will create a cost comparison; for example, a typical on-premises environment moving to Azure. You could substitute this with the details of an actual on-premises infrastructure and any workloads you have details of.

Task – accessing the TCO calculator

  1. Open a browser and enter the following URL: https://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/tco/calculator.

Task – defining your workloads

  1. From the Define your workloads section, click on the information icon next to each selected field.
  2. From the Server section, select the following information or use your example data:
    • Enter a name for the workload or use the provided default.
    • Workload: Windows/Linux Server.
    • Environment: Virtual Machines.
    • Operating system: Windows.
    • Operating system license: Datacenter.
    • VMs: 100.
    • Virtualization: VMware.
    • Cores: 4.
    • Ram: 8.
    • Optimize by: Memory
    • Windows Server 2008/2008 R2: Off
  1. Add any additional server workloads as required.
  2. From the Databases section, enter the following information or use your example data:
    • Enter a name for the database, or use the provided default.
    • Source Database: Microsoft SQL Server.
    • License: Standard.
    • Environment: Virtual Machines.
    • Operating system: Windows.
    • Operating system license: Datacenter.
    • VMs: 15.
    • Virtualization: VMware.
    • Cores: 8.
    • RAM: 32.
    • Optimize by: Memory.
    • Windows Server 2008/2008 R2: Off.
    • Destination Service: SQL Database Managed Instance.
    • Managed instance tier: General purpose.
    • Managed instance cores: 8.
    • SQL Server storage: 100.
    • SQL Server backup: 100.
  1. Add any additional databases as required.
  2. From the Storage section, enter the following information or use your example data:
    • Enter a name for the storage or use the provided default
    • Storage type: Local Disk/SAN.
    • Disk type: SSD.
    • Capacity: 2 TB.
    • Backup: 2 TB.
    • Archive: 8 TB.
    • IOPS: 4,000.
  1. Add additional storage as required.
  2. From the Networking section, enter the following information or use your example data:
  • Outbound bandwidth: 100 GB

10. Click Next.

Task – adjusting your assumptions

  1. From the Adjust assumptions screen, review all the options and alter them as required. Alternatively, leave the default assumptions as is.
  2. Click Next.

Task – viewing the report

  1. From the View report screen, review the cost savings report.
  2. You can modify your entries by scrolling to the bottom of the screen and clicking Back.
  3. You can download, share, and save the report.

In this exercise, we created a cost comparison for an on-premises environment moving to Azure. Now, let’s summarize this chapter.

More Details
Apr 12, 2023
Azure SLAs – Azure Service-Level Agreements

Azure SLAs

An SLA sets out a customer’s expected level of service from their service provider; it can include responsibilities, vocabulary and terminology, claims and credit processes, service quality, and availability metrics.

Microsoft defines an SLA as Microsoft’s commitments to uptime and connectivity, meaning the amount of time the services are online, available, and operational.

Microsoft provides each service with an individual SLA that will detail what is covered by the agreement and any exceptions; a percentage of the monthly fees are credited for any service that does not meet the guarantees. Previews and free services are not provided with an SLA. Information about each service’s SLA can be found at the following URLs:

Service availability is expressed as the uptime percentage over time; Microsoft SLAs are expressed monthly.

Availability is typically referred to as 9s (nines); for example, this can be expressed as four nines of availability, meaning the service will be available and fully operational for 99.99% of the defined period. In contrast to availability and uptime, it is also important to consider downtime, which means the amount of time the service will not be available for.

While we see lots of references to availability and uptime when looking at an SLA that will be provided for a service, the customer and consumer of the services will want to know what that means in the real world and what impact any breach may mean to them. Therefore, it is often the case that the real metric that matters is downtime, which means for a given SLA, how long is that service permitted to be down (that is, not available from the service provider)? You should scrutinize any SLA to determine whether that level of downtime is acceptable.

The following table illustrates examples of SLA commitments and downtime permitted per month as part of an SLA:

For reference, 99.9% is the minimum SLA that Microsoft provides; 99.999 % is the maximum. It should be noted that 100% can’t be provided by Microsoft.

You should also be aware of the concept of a composite SLA; this means that when you combine services (such as virtual machines and the underlying services such as storage, networking components, and so on), the overall SLA is lower than the individual highest SLA on one of the services. This is because each service that you add increases the probability of failure and increases complexity. An example exercise will be provided later in this chapter to illustrate this important concept.

The following actions will positively impact and increase your SLA:

  • Using services that provide an SLA (or improve the service SLA), such as Azure AD Basic and Premium editions and Premium SSD managed disks
  • Adding redundant resources, such as resources to additional/multiple regions
  • Adding availability solutions, such as using Availability Sets and Availability Zones

The following actions will negatively impact and decrease your SLA:

  • Adding multiple services due to the nature of composite SLAs
  • Choosing non-SLA-backed services or free services

The following actions will have no impact on your SLA:

  • Adding multiple tenancies
  • Adding multiple subscriptions
  • Adding multiple admin accounts

The Azure status page (https://status.azure.com) provides a global overview of the service health across all regions; this should be the first place you visit, should you suspect there is a wider issue affecting the availability of services globally. From the status page, you can click through to Azure Service Health in the Azure portal, which provides a personalized view of the availability of the services that are being used within your Azure subscriptions.

Service credits are paid through a claims process by a service provider when they do meet the guarantees of the agreed service level. As we mentioned previously, previews and free services are not provided with a financially backed SLA and are not entitled to service credits for any service downtime. You should evaluate all your services to ensure that, where required, you always have an SLA-backed service; as they say, there is often an operational impact that’s felt from free services.

If you suspect that your services have been affected and that Microsoft has not been able to meet their SLA, then it is your responsibility to take action and pursue credit; you must submit a claim to receive service credit. For most services, you must submit the claim the month after the month the service was impacted. If your services are provided through the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) channel, they will pursue this claim on your behalf and provide the service refunds accordingly.

In this section, we looked at Azure SLAs. In the next section, we will look at the Azure service life cycle.

More Details
Jan 12, 2023
Exercise 1 – exploring the SLA for a service – Azure Service-Level Agreements

Exercise 1 – exploring the SLA for a service

This section will look at the resources we can use to gather information on the SLA for a service; we will look at the SLA information for App Service, Virtual Desktop, Virtual Machines, and Load Balancer.

The following subsections cover how to complete this exercise. They have been segregated into tasks for ease of understanding.

Task – accessing the SLA summary for Azure services

  1. From a browser, go to https://azure.microsoft.com/support/legal/sla/summary:

Figure 12.1 – SLA summary for Azure services

Task – viewing the SLA for App Service

  1. From the SLA summary for Azure services page, scroll down and locate App Service.
  2. Note what Microsoft specifies they will guarantee and the amount of available time expressed as a percentage; note what doesn’t have an SLA.
  3. Click on View full details. You can open this in a new tab or window if you prefer.
  4. By looking at the SLA for the individual service, you will see a format that is the same across all services that you should familiarize yourself with.
  5. Expand and explore the content in the Introduction, General Terms, and SLA details sections:

Figure 12.2 – SLA for App Service

7. You can view the Version History details of an SLA, download the SLA, and learn more about the service to go to the product information page for that service.

Task – viewing the SLA for Azure Virtual Desktop

  1. From the SLA summary for Azure services page, scroll down and locate Azure Virtual Desktop.
  2. Note that Microsoft does not offer a financially backed SLA for this service and that they use the language …strive to attain at least…, which means there is no guarantee on the service level available. They note that the Virtual Machine SLA covers the availability of any session hosts.

Task – viewing the SLA for a virtual machine

  1. From the SLA summary for Azure services page, scroll down and locate Cloud Services and Virtual Machines.
  2. Note the difference in what is guaranteed for virtual machines that have two or more instances deployed in the same Availability Set and any single-instance virtual machines using premium storage for all disks; ensure you deploy virtual machines in a way that provides the availability and SLA that you need.
  3. Click on View full details. You can open this in a new tab or window if you prefer.
  4. Expand and explore the content in the Introduction, General Terms, and SLA details sections.

Task – viewing the SLA for Load Balancer

  1. From the SLA summary for Azure services page, scroll down and locate Load Balancer.
  2. Note what Microsoft indicates they will guarantee and the amount of time available expressed as a percentage; note what type of Load Balancer SKU does not have an SLA provided.
  3. Click on View full details. You can open this in a new tab or window if you prefer.
  4. Expand and explore the content in the Introduction, General Terms, and SLA details sections.

In this exercise, we looked at the resources that we can use to gather information on the SLA for a service.

In the next exercise, we will look at where to find information for Azure Preview features.

More Details