jcapriotti wrote: ↑Mon Jan 22, 2024 12:15 pm
This I'm not finding to be true in all cases. Our PDM servers for example, we have one DB server and 3 replication servers. Then two development/test servers that are both DB and Archive each.
Before moving them to Azure, We replaced the 4 production servers every 5 years at around $5000 each. The old production servers became the new Dev/Test servers, so they were bought and paid for.
On Premise
$26,000 every five years (4 servers at $5000 each + $6000 for three tape backup systems)
$5200 per year
$433 per month
Azure servers
$4500 per month (6 servers x $750 each)
$54,000 per year
$270,000 per 5 years
There are infrastructure and labor costs I can't easily add for on-prem but I'm skeptical it makes up the difference. Also, we are losing some productivity going from 1ms on premise latency to 35-40ms Azure latency. Any SolidWorks models read from a network drive is 5-10x slower and PDM is slower to download and upload.
There are certainly cases where cloud makes more sense. I think a hybrid approach is better and more cost effective. But our company is convinced that IT needs to be completely outsourced and offsite.
even factoring 6 cloud servers vs 4 on premise and their electricity bill, cloud solution is still about 1.5 times more expensive?
plus loss of productivity due to lag and speed bottlenecks.
An admin inside the company is still needed so that cost too is still there.
I think that there is some scenario that could take more advantages from cloud like backup, geographical replication etc
Putting workstations on the cloud with servers could make some sense, but with those costs is not going to be cheaper than on premise.
which in turn is what we are lookIng for: a cheaper alternative to leased hardware on premise and lower maintenance costs.
iirc 2 yrs ago there was a presentation from cati (not sure) and their solidworks benchmarks shown that a workstation on azure costs more with slower performance compared to the on premise solution.
yes you could pay more to have more cpu clock, but nowhere near 5GHz (and even new cpus are going back to 4...)
They gave it the swamp treatment, left it to sink to the bottom hoping nobody brings it up again