D2 3 Computing e-Infrastructure cost calculations and business _models_vam1-final

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e-‐FISCAL: www.efiscal.eu EC Contract Number: 283449 o o e-‐Infrastructure computing providers and HPC/HTC centre managers should keep track of their cost structures and their costs through a systematic way to assist in planning and determining their centres’ sustainability. e-‐Infrastructure computing providers should be making their costs available openly contributing to the Open Data and Open Science paradigm, especially as the related funding is based on public funding. • The e-‐FISCAL tools are open freely for those that don’t have related methodology and model Research communities and end users As computing costs is not the sole issue in the in-‐house vs. commercial cloud discussions, users should make an effort to collect and document the experiences on the use of in-‐house vs. commercial clouds in order to get a more holistic view of the effort and complexity required in doing their jobs e-‐Infrastructure policy makers and funding agencies Funding agencies of research infrastructures should request from all e-‐Infrastructure providers that receive public national or European funding to ensure publication and open access to data about funding of their e-‐Infrastructures 67 . Given the uprising competition from commercial cloud providers, e-‐Infrastructure policy makers and funding agencies should recognise the cost parameter as an important parameter in the sustainability of computing e-‐Infrastructures. 5.6 e- FISCAL sustainability and exploitation The sustainability of the e-‐FISCAL approach depends to a high degree on the number of individuals and organisations that adopt it in the future activities. The survey results themselves remain relevant only relatively short period, but helping European e-‐Infrastructure actors to align their cost assessment and reporting methodologies in terms of cost categories and even tools used to estimate and gather information will have a considerably longer positive impact. To achieve these goals, it is essential that they are both continuously used in a sufficiently visible project and made available under licensing terms that maximise the uptake. The first prerequisite is fulfilled through the adoption of the e-‐FISCAL survey methodology by the annual EGI compendium efforts. The survey will collect wide range of information related to the EGI infrastructure and makes this data available in the pan-‐European compendium document. The next survey will include the full cost-related questionnaire developed in the context of the e-‐FISCAL project. The e-‐FISCAL tools themselves will remain available through the e-‐FISCAL project website. The cost models are published in the project deliverables, and the tools used to analyse the information are licensed in a way that maximises the uptake while still ensuring that the link to the e-‐FISCAL project remains visible. To achieve this goal, the following licencing approaches have been chosen: 67 Based on the e-‐IRG related recommendation from the e-‐IRG paper: Cloud Computing for research and science: a holistic overview, policy, and recommendations http://www.e-‐irg.eu/images/stories/dissemination/e-irg_cloud_computing_paper_v.final.pdf e-‐FISCAL : Financial Study for Sustainable Computing e-‐Infrastructures Deliverable D2.3 – Computing e-‐Infrastructures cost estimation and analysis – Pricing and Business models 74
e-‐FISCAL: www.efiscal.eu EC Contract Number: 283449 • The online tool is released under Affero General Public License, version 1. This allows anyone copy the online tool, modify it and install and provide it (either in original or modified form) as a service on their own environment providing that the source code used to provide service will be made available on the same server that is running the software. • Other tools, such as the Excel-‐based cost assessment tool, are released under the “Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported” license 68 . This license grants anyone the right to share (copy, distribute) and adapt (including for commercial purposes) the work, provided they mention that the work is based on e-‐FISCAL contributions and that any derived work is distributed under similar license. We also have developed a questionnaire with ranges that we did not have time to exploit. This can be also considered as one extra tool. • The e-‐FISCAL consortium partners are willing to provide consulting services to computing centres or even other e-‐Infrastructure components, as well as to other research infrastructure (non-‐e-‐Infrastructures such as ESFRI ones). An alternative method can be to partner in proposals or projects with such related entities. • The e-‐FISCAL consortium expertise and know-‐how can be further exploited to understand better the cost of data infrastructures and data management, although being more complex and other methodologies should be more appropriate. 5.7 Discussion: Applying e- FISCAL results in managerial decision making In the following sections the project findings are put into the context of strategic or operational managerial decision making in an organisation using non-‐trivial 69 amounts of IT resources to support its activities. The cost-related mechanisms influencing sustainability of non-‐profit organisations may be more indirect and less immediate in their nature than ones in the commercial marketplace, but in both cases cost-‐effective, reliable and efficient provisioning of services that fulfil the current and future needs of the end-‐users is a crucial long-‐term success factor for any organisation. 5.7.1 Cost-effectiveness considerations The analysis of the cost effectiveness based on the e-‐FISCAL results indicate that an in-‐house infrastructure having high utilisation rate (e.g. over 65%) is in almost all cases cost effective when compared to cloud pricing. This assumes that the personnel costs in the overall yearly IT expenditure are roughly 50%, i.e. similar to average/median values in the e-‐FISCAL study. In the case where the organisation uses (mainly) in-‐house IT services and the utilisation rate is high, the cost saving potential is rather limited. Rather than focusing on IT cost savings the attention should be focused on variations in the demand and estimating the probability and business impact of situations where the demand for IT resources exceed the in-‐house capacity. If either one of them is high, investigating whether additional in-‐house capacity or development and deployment costs of a hybrid infrastructure (including Cloud resources to handle 68 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-‐sa/3.0/ 69 It is difficult to quantify universally what the “non-‐trivial” means since it depends quite heavily on the nature of the organisation. e-‐FISCAL : Financial Study for Sustainable Computing e-‐Infrastructures Deliverable D2.3 – Computing e-‐Infrastructures cost estimation and analysis – Pricing and Business models 75
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