IT Migrations are often complex and expensive exercises. There are inherent risks in moving your IT estate to the public Cloud, including potential downtime, added expenses and undiscovered dependencies. Add to this a labyrinth of rules surrounding licensed software, and many IT directors are left with questions such as “How much will this cost to run on AWS?” Or “Can I even bring these licences over to AWS?”. It’s no wonder many migrations fail to get off the ground; building a business case to even begin the planning is complex enough.
An Optimization and Licensing Assessment by Devoteam is a funded program from AWS that evaluates your existing IT landscape. By gathering detailed information about your existing server hardware, current performance statistics and licensing details, we can effectively and accurately evaluate your projected running costs on AWS and build a roadmap that shows how to maximize your existing licensing investments on AWS while minimizing your running costs.
Our OLA covers the following areas:
- Tenancy considerations
- Licence costs
- An on-premise review
- Migration options
- Deployment blueprints
- Instance Optimization
- SQL Server optimization
- Oracle licensing
- Microsoft licensing and renewal considerations
- Storage requirements
- Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
- Cloud-to-Cloud mapping
Benefits and Outcomes of a successful OLA
An OLA helps businesses assess and optimize their current on-premises and cloud environments based on actual resources, utilization and third-party licensing.
AWS has deep experience running business-critical Microsoft Workloads, running nearly twice the amount of Windows server instances in the cloud compared to Microsoft and being the first cloud service to offer Windows server instances in 2008. Independent benchmarking shows that AWS delivers nearly 2 times better performance and up to 40% price-performance advantage for SQL Server on AWS when compared to other major cloud providers.
Recent research has shown that an OLA can help customers lower their TCO by reducing their Windows server licensing costs by up to 77% and MS SQL licensing by 45% when compared to on-premises. For customers with Oracle workloads, customers can realize a reduction of up to 66% fewer Oracle CPU threads.
Why is an OLA Necessary?
Moving your existing IT estate to AWS requires a significant investment in time and resources. Knowing up-front your projected running costs and how to maximize the efficiency of your existing investments helps make data driven decisions, giving confidence moving forward.
Research has shown that customers typically spend 3 times the average cost of licensing when compared to Compute, Storage and Networking costs. Therefore, it’s critical to understand where your costs are going and how to streamline your expenditure.
Customers also face challenges in coming to grips with their existing IT estate, understanding what their future costs will look like and how they can utilize AWS to modernize their applications.
Licence terms and conditions are also regularly changing, making it difficult for customers to know which licenses they can use on AWS and under what circumstances. For example, many licences are tied to the number of CPU cores the physical underlying hardware has. Without knowing these intricate details, customers can often end up spending more than necessary, or worse still, find themselves in breach of their licensing agreement. This is why we engage with trusted licensing delivery partners who are experts in Microsoft and Oracle licensing terms and agreements and effectively guide you through the complexities.
How is an OLA carried out?
We begin an OLA by understanding your business. Through a direct workshop with you, we seek to understand your business drivers and objectives and the specific circumstances and challenges that you operate under.
We then determine the scope of the assessment, such as the infrastructure and workloads that need to be evaluated. We then gather the data necessary to perform the assessment. To do this we deploy tooling into your environment that gathers and collects critical information about your IT estate such as the provisioned CPU, Memory and storage, operating system and database versions and current performance metrics. This can be done using agents installed on your servers or agentless data collectors, depending on your IT security requirements. The data collected is then sent securely to the AWS Migration Evaluator where it is analysed.
In addition to the above data, we also leverage the expertise of a trusted licensing delivery partner who evaluates your specific licence terms to provide recommendations on how to best utilize your existing licences on AWS.
We then analyse the collected data and present this to you in a detailed report.
What do customers receive from an OLA?
Customers receive a report which gives detailed insights and recommendations on topics such as:
- What your expected costs would be for a direct lift-and-shift migration
- Expected costs for an optimized migration, taking into account factors such as Reserved Instances, Savings Plans and right-sizing the virtual machines to ensure the provisioned resources match the required performance and licensing conditions
- Recommendations on storage options
- Mapping of licensing to AWS
- A pathway to modernization factoring in topics such as database freedom, containers and open source
Upon delivery of the report, we also hold a playback session with your stakeholders to provide an overview of the findings and recommendations and give you an opportunity to ask questions.
