By ProfitBricks Guest Blog

The great cloud migration has begun in earnest. 2014 was a pivotal year when the clients of MSPs started pushing back and demanding cloud computing solutions over on-premise capital expenditures. It’s simply not enough to be an MSP or VAR and sell only servers, storage and hardware upgrades. These days, business owners know a great deal about the cloud offerings available. Additionally, the early fears of cloud security are being diminished by the countless success stories and case studies of big name companies moving to the cloud.

MSPs have a few options–more SaaS solutions or delaying the inevitable replacement of on-premise infrastructure with cloud infrastructure.

Sure, email and CRM migrations to the cloud were painful, and many MSPs experienced margin loss. However, today,  in 2015, most of those projects are viewed as a success. The perception is that on-premise-to-cloud infrastructure migrations are complicated, but with second-generation cloud providers, such as ProfitBricks, migrations are now painless.

IaaS: You Don’t Always Get What You Pay For

One issue that MSPs should be aware of is the fact that with IaaS, you don’t always get what you pay for.  

For example, let’s take a look at a traditional Dell PowerEdge server or HP ProLiant server. When you are ordering a server as an upgrade or for a new application, you place your order with Tech Data, Insight, and so on, and you specify the exact CPU processor model number, a precise amount of RAM, storage, networking options and more. You’ve either followed the requirements of the vendor, or you’ve gone for the best price/performance ratio that will meet the needs of the workload.

But when you are specifying out a virtual machine on the cloud, you see things like a vCPU and choices of 2/4/8/16 or a “core” and 1/2/4/8.  You might be wondering, “What do those values mean?” On top of these limited choices and unclear performance levels, you don’t know how the “multitenant” nature of the virtual machine will actually affect performance. To be on the safe side, many buyers simply order more than they need, which winds up costing MSP clients a great deal. Will your client get what it pays for? Exactly how “fast” in GHz is that 4 vCPU machine?

The good news is that a second generation of cloud computing IaaS platforms has launched, like ProfitBricks.  With these new platforms, you’ll be able to precisely specify every virtual machine to your exact specifications, and the virtual machine CPU cores and RAM will be dedicated to your client. No sharing. No performance variation. And because the virtual machine can be precisely set when bought, and later can be scaled up and down, you won’t have to “over spec” the virtual machine.  

If you’d like to learn more about what to look for when looking for a solution provider to resell cloud computing IaaS and its virtual machines, storage and networks, check out the white papers Six Considerations When Selecting a Cloud Computing Solution Provider and The Secret World of Cloud Computing Pricing.

Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.