Maximize your cost savings with VMware Cloud on AWS

by Dan Houdek, Head of Product Marketing, Rackspace Technology

icon of piggy bank inside a cloud

According to 451 Research, over 90% of businesses are running workloads in the cloud. Yet all of the surveyed businesses continue to also use on-premises private cloud. This trend toward hybrid cloud — which leverages both public and private clouds — continues to gain momentum, with over half of businesses currently using or planning to use a fully integrated hybrid cloud environment.  

But making the shift to hybrid cloud is tough. Operational workflows that were built around your legacy systems will need to change. And your team may not have the skill sets necessary to start running workloads in the cloud or even the time to manage multiple cloud platforms.

Rackspace Managed VMware Cloud on AWS addresses this gap by migrating your on-premises workloads to a VMware SDDC stack, running on top of dedicated hosts within an AWS data center — all managed by our VMware and AWS experts. This simplifies your path to a managed hybrid cloud, while enabling you to use existing VMware management tools. Plus, your applications gain native access to the broad portfolio of AWS cloud services.

For many organizations, VMware Cloud on AWS, combined with managed services from Rackspace Technology, can also deliver an unprecedentedly lower total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to keeping your workloads on-premises. This article takes a closer look at how Rackspace Managed VMware Cloud on AWS can help you optimize your TCO.

 

Maximizing business value from VMware Cloud on AWS

According to a 2020 IDC study, “The Business Value of Running Applications on VMware Cloud on AWS in VMware Hybrid Cloud Environments,” organizations running applications on VMware Cloud for AWS completed migrations faster, with less risk and at a much lower cost:

  • 57% lower overall cost to migrate equivalent
  • 59% less staff time
  • 46% faster to migrate

Compared with running the same workloads in a traditional on-premises environment, participants reported that they can better support their businesses on VMware Cloud for AWS, while achieving a 351% three-year ROI. The study linked these cost benefits to four key areas: performance, agility, business impact and infrastructure. Let’s take a look at each of these and how organizations could gain even greater TCO than reported in the study.

 

Improved performance and reliability

Companies reported that the switch to VMware Cloud on AWS resulted in a more resilient and agile infrastructure, with an 83% reduction in frequency and duration of unplanned outages. This minimizes the costs related to lost productivity and revenue.

Participants also reported improvements in application performance and risk-related metrics, creating a better experience for users.

“Our users are seeing higher performance with VMware Cloud on AWS, and they’re getting more information delivered at the speed that they need. Because we’re operating a medical facility, we need speed, performance, and security, especially when moving data from one location to another. Our users are 10% more productive on average as a result.” – IDC Study Participant

 

You’re likely to see even greater improvements in productivity and reduced risk when using Rackspace Managed VMware Cloud on AWS with our optional Guest OS Services. Not only do our experts handle the management of your VMware Cloud on AWS environment, but they can also handle the day-to-day management of your virtualized operating system. From monitoring, patching, configuration and optimization to antivirus licensing and updates, our experts can maintain and support your guest operating systems 24x7x365. Furthermore, Rackspace Managed VMware Cloud on AWS can be used as a low-cost disaster recovery site for your on-premises VMware workloads.

Improved agility

With VMware Cloud on AWS, participants reported being able to deploy new VMs 66% faster, leading to a 14% higher productivity for application development teams. They’re able to move and increase their footprint on workloads out into AWS as needed — moving entire workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS or just adding on additional VMs.

“We are absolutely more agile with VMware Cloud on AWS. We can stand up as many machines as we want, and there’s no limit or direct costs in doing this.” – IDC Study Participant

Rackspace Technology expertise can elevate that agility even more. From implementing auto-scaling for peak times, to integration with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) that allows customers to scale work-from-home environments to thousands of employees, our VMware experts have helped customers around the global leverage key features of VMware Cloud on AWS.

Business impact

VMware Cloud on AWS requires less staff time to manage, secure and support infrastructure environments, which frees up IT teams to work on other initiatives and support business growth. For IT infrastructure teams, the staff time required to manage infrastructure was reduced by 48%; security teams and help desk teams achieved efficiencies of 26% and 69%, on average, respectively.

Also, with fewer unplanned downtimes, respondents reported being able to bill more hours with less downtime.

“One hour less of downtime can mean millions of dollars for [our company].” – IDC Study Participant

With Rackspace Managed VMware Cloud on AWS, your IT teams are able to focus even more time on initiatives that are core to your business rather than managing the service. We provide consolidated billing and flexible payment options, a single source for 24x7x365 support with dedicated account teams, and access to proactive monitoring and troubleshooting across multiple clouds, eliminating the need to manage AWS and VMware Cloud on AWS accounts directly.

More efficient and cost-effective infrastructure

Respondents reported that, by moving their workloads from on-premises environments to VMware Cloud on AWS, they’re able to run equivalent workloads at an average 44% lower cost over three years. This is related to both infrastructure-related savings and staff time efficiencies.

“Before using VMware Cloud on AWS, we had 300 servers, but we’ve been able to reduce that number by 25% … Also, we’re avoiding having to refresh another 10% of those servers, so 35% of servers in total … We’re avoiding $1.5 million of server hardware refreshes.” – IDC Study Participant

In some cases, these cost savings could be even greater if VMware Cloud on AWS didn’t require the purchase of additional hosts just to increase the amount of storage. Rackspace Technology has solved this problem for our customers by jointly developing with NetApp — the only globally available externally attached storage that connects natively to AWS as a data store. Rackspace Cloud Volume Service allows customers to add storage without having to purchase additional hosts. For storage-heavy workloads or those leveraging VMware Cloud on AWS as a disaster recovery (DR) solution, this could result in up to 40% or more in savings.

 

The experts at Rackspace Technology are here to help

While the TCO of VMware Cloud on AWS is clearly defined in the IDC Study, they do call out that — due to the accelerated commitment to move to the cloud post-pandemic — organizations will require guidance. They will need assistance implementing and demonstrating their modernization and transformation initiatives and identifying “optimal ways to unlock value from this easy-to-use hybrid cloud experience.”

Again, this is a hurdle Rackspace Technology has helped customers quickly overcome. No matter where you are on your cloud journey, Rackspace Technology can accelerate, optimize and simplify your transformation to VMware Cloud on AWS. We have built a Center of Excellence around VMware Cloud on AWS that leverages the cross-platform expertise and thousands of VMware and AWS certifications across hundreds of experts. These experts are here to provision and manage your VMware Cloud on AWS environment, migrate your VMware workloads and progressively transform your applications to cloud native when the time is right.

For over 15 years, we have been managing VMware environments and serving as a trusted advisor to our customers, providing unbiased guidance across architecture, migration and cloud transformation strategies. It’s our Fanatical Experience® across VMware Cloud on AWS that truly differentiates Rackspace Technology and enables us to further optimize the TCO on VMware Cloud on AWS.

Rackspace Technology is currently offering a 30-day no-risk proof-of-concept trial for its Managed VMware Cloud on AWS offering to help customers accelerate the value they are able to achieve with hybrid cloud.

 

Reduce your TCO with VMware Cloud on AWS