Cloud Health by VMWare
CloudHealth Enabled VMware to Regain Control and Optimize Public Cloud Spend
VMWARE, A Subsidiary of DELL Technologies, provides Cloud Computing and Platform Virtualization Software and Services. It was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. Today, VMware software powers the world's complex digital infrastructure. The company's various offerings provide a dynamic and efficient digital foundation to more than 500,000 customers globally, aided by an ecosystem of 75,000 partners.
What is CloudHealth
CloudHealth is a multi-cloud management platform that enables ends users and partners to analyze, optimize, and govern multi-cloud operations from a single pane of glass. A platform for management, operations, and service delivery, the CloudHealth Partner Platform provides a centralized console to simplify customer management and streamline billing to deliver value added services.
It provides the ability to isolate customer usage and cost for internal reporting needs and set unique pricing, while giving branded access to the platform as a value-added service to customers. Partners are able to improve efficiency, monetize their public cloud business, and increase margins.
The CloudHealth Partner Platform was specifically designed to help MSPs offer superior cloud management services, address a rapidly expanding industry opportunity and boost profitability. CloudHealth works with MSPs to help accelerate their ability to extend their service portfolio and bring strategic cloud services to market quicker to address multi-cloud requirements.
Key Benefits
- All public cloud users have complete insight into ongoing cloud spend
- Overall cloud expenditures decreased more than 30%
- Achieved predictable and discounted pricing through long-term cloud provider programs
THE CHALLENGE
While cloud technology has revolutionized the way enterprises consume IT, there are significant challenges surrounding control and optimization of spend. As VMware started to build solutions on multiple clouds-including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure-these drawbacks soon emerged. The company had no visibility into what they were spending or where, and that spend was skyrocketing. Further, IT needed a platform that enabled them to be transparent to the colleague (end user) community within each of the VMware business units while bringing structure to the multicloud environment.
THE SOLUTION
The IT team's initial attempt involved consolidating all public cloud accounts under a single umbrella account, an approach that would provide decision makers with better visibility. The challenge was that native tools such as AWS Cost Explorer only offered insight into their own clouds-it was still near impossible to get consolidated cost data across all clouds. Similarly, it was difficult to associate that spend with key business dimensions like business unit, cost center, etc.
The answer was found in CloudHealth, a comprehensive, best-inclass dedicated platform that offers all-new capabilities for visibility, optimization, and proactive management of any type of cloud usage. CloudHealth manages more than $8 billion in total cloud spend across several vendors, so it offered immense knowledge and leadership right out of the box.
UNPARALLELED VISIBILITY
Thanks to CloudHealth, IT is now able to present business units with data that clearly outlines what they are actually spending and on what type of service, so much so the software has become the company's 'transparency engine'. In many cases, this was an eye-opener as teams simply did not know-there was a (valid) perception that public cloud consumption was significantly less expensive than previous methodologies, so usage was essentially 'free'. The software-generated information proved so effective that, today, every group from finance to engineering must employ this new approach to clean up (and justify) their cloud usage and spend.
OPTIMIZATION-FOLLOWING A TRIED AND TRUE RETAIL BUSINESS MODEL
With a consolidated view of spend, the IT team realized they could implement a business model any warehouse club shopper knows well- buy in bulk to save money. While the public clouds offer significant flexibility, the reality was VMware paid 'full retail' for every minute of use. Now that IT knew the company's approximate cloud spend, negotiators could approach the vendors for better pricing based on volume. Public cloud providers offer discount pricing programs, commonly known as 'Reserved Instances' (RIs), that allow enterprises to trade predictability for better pricing.
PROACTIVE MANAGEMENT MADE EASY
CloudHealth has a number of policy options to allow IT team members to be proactive with cloud optimization. A budget policy was implemented that would alert engineers and finance controllers when an account was nearing 80% of their monthly budget spend. Another policy was created to expose 'waste' in the form of disconnected Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, elastic IPs and aging snapshots. In the near future, once stakeholder buy-in is achieved, an automatic cleanup option for such waste will be enabled.
RESULTS THAT MADE AN IMMEDIATE IMPACT
With CloudHealth, the VMware IT team significantly eliminated VMware's overall cloud resource waste. This effort alone reduced the company's public cloud compute cost by more than 35%. By exposing data, the team stabilized the growth of their public cloud spend and brought all-new levels of predictability to budgeting efforts.
Every organization is on a multi-cloud journey. As customers are now embracing multi-cloud driven by diverse and evolving business needs, VMware Cloud Providers are trusted advisors for customers in their cloud journey. The VMware Cloud Provider Program is a key pillar to the VMware Cloud strategy, representing more than 4,200 partners in more than 120 countries that are delivering services using VMware Cloud solutions. Collectively, VCPP partners serve more than 150,000 customers with millions of VMs deployed. Customers can benefit from a robust, differentiated set of enterprise-class clouds using the latest VMware innovations to simplify hybrid cloud adoption and management with consistent infrastructure and new cloud services.
With the new innovations such as CloudHealth, cloud providers are better able to capture the industry opportunity for multi-cloud managed services. With CloudHealth, partners can create managed services to support customers adopting a multi-cloud strategy inclusive of non-VMware based clouds. By adopting new solutions such as CloudHealth, VMware Cloud Providers enhance their position as trusted cloud advisor to customers by addressing the complexity of multi-cloud management.
Download the VMware CloudHealth Document(PDF).