Cloud Platform System: Cloud-in-a-box delivering the best price-to-performance and scale economics

Microsoft’s Cloud Platform System (CPS) embodies the core tenets of our modern cloud infrastructure offerings of high scalability, enterprise-grade and hybrid. Leveraging Microsoft’s vast experience in operating some of the world’s largest data centers and in software-based technologies and innovation, CPS has been optimized to deliver private cloud within your datacenter in days, not months, with the best price-to-performance, and one of the most compelling scaled cost economics in the industry.

In an independent research project conducted by Value Prism, sponsored by Microsoft, the research firm compared the total system cost of CPS with other existing Converged Infrastructure offerings in the market like VCE’s Vblock 340, HP’s CS700 with VMWare and IBM PureFlex System with VMWare. This included hardware, software licenses, deployment, maintenance and support over a period of five years.

From a price-to-performance perspective on a single ‘rack’ basis, CPS delivers the lowest five-year price-per-VM compared to the rest of the named competitive offerings. For a standard VM profile (of 2vCPU, 3.5GB RAM, 260 GB Disk), at $4,350 per VM, CPS is cheaper than the next closest competitor Vblock 340 (at $5,020 per VM) by between 15%-20%. For a data center running hundreds of VMs, this could potentially translate into hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost savings for a deployment of CPS.

CPS also delivers comparable or superior performance in other secondary price-to-performance metrics such as price-per-core, price-per-memory and price-per-usable storage. Leading in workload performance metrics such as available memory-per-core and available storage-per-core compared to the other competitive offerings, CPS is much better resourced to deliver against intensive and mixed workloads.

As companies grow both in terms of workload demands and in scale, CPS is uniquely positioned to deliver even more attractive economic benefits. Due to the CPS architecture, CPS delivers increasing VM density as more racks are added to the stamp, thereby lowering the price-per-VM, while most competitive offerings remained little changed. This enables CPS customers to benefit from economies of scale as they grow their business. At a full-stamp configuration of four racks of CPS, the price-per-VM for CPS can potentially be as much as 45%-50% lower than that of an equivalent Vblock deployment.

Such breakthrough economics delivered by CPS has primarily been made possible by our relentless focus on driving cost efficiency and performance within our own Azure data centers, and making that technology and innovation available to CPS, our Azure-consistent cloud in the box offering. We are committed to extending CPS’ lead in price-to-performance and scale economics, as we continue to leverage best-practices and innovation from operating our cloud-scale data centers. Microsoft, with its broad and strong portfolio of offerings both for on-premises as well as for public and service provider clouds, enables CPS to truly deliver an unparalleled hybrid experience that best delivers the services that fit your needs and budget.

You can find out more about CPS product information and price-to-performance economics here.