Date: May 21, 2018
Author: 11:11 Systems
11:11 Catalyst made its debut appearance at VeeamON 2018 and left with the inaugural Veeam Innovation Award. Our newest tool allows you to rightsize your cloud and rightsize your cost. What more could you ask for in a day and age where cloud adoption is at an all time high?
Surely, you’ve read the analysts reports and heard the news: Organizations everywhere are embracing cloud technologies because they are scalable, cost-effective and ultimately let IT teams get back to bringing value to the business (instead of managing yet another box). Cloud brings a new cost model to the table in the way of OPEX and monthly usage spend versus CAPEX and ongoing maintenance. In the past, IT teams would fight for every penny they could get in the budget, knowing that what they bought today would have to last a minimum of three years. They hoped they got the best and biggest thing they could afford, because they weren’t getting more money anytime soon. Cloud flips that mentality upside down because it allows teams to only pay for what they consume and it has the scalability and agility to quickly grow as needed.
You would think that solves everyone’s problem, but the next thing that comes up in conversation is “Well, how much do I need?” Adequately rightsizing your cloud environment is important to realizing all of the cost benefits that started you on this journey. There are implications to not right sizing your environment, whether you are running backups to the cloud, disaster recovery to the cloud or even fully migrating your infrastructure. If you undersize, you will find yourself in some adverse predicament that then requires scrambling to allocate more resources and change the initial amount you had planned. On the other hand, if you treat the cloud like traditional hardware purchases and just buy as much as you can, you could be paying for resources and capacity you aren’t even using.
It’s even more important to understand what you need and use to adequately plan for your cloud utilization. Again, you could buy everything under the sun, but then you are defeating one of the reasons you chose to move to the cloud. Under-provisioning IaaS from a capacity standpoint means that a system could potentially not work properly, especially if it sees a rapid growth and there is no room to grow. Under-provisioning IaaS from a CPU/memory perspective means that the systems will not perform well, or perhaps not at all. As this is now your primary data center, this can cause frustration – even downtime.
Take out the guesswork with 11:11 Catalyst
11:11 Catalyst will query your environment and let you choose what systems you want to use for cloud services. When using the tool you can pick the virtual machines you will be backing up, or select an entire resource group for migration or disaster recovery. 11:11 Catalyst will let you know exactly how much space those systems consume, and in the case of IaaS/DRaaS, how much CPU and memory they are using. Beyond that,11:11 Catalyst will measure latency and bandwidth between any of our global data centers and not only show you that information, but also analyze and update your selected machines so you know exactly how long it will take to seed a backup or replica and how long each differential is expected to take. Adjust your retention policies for backups and see how the storage requirement changes on the fly so you can be confident in knowing your backups will have the space they need and that you aren’t paying for space you aren’t using. Understand exactly how much in the way of resources are being used for those machines so you can adequately plan for the cost of a DR failover or running those systems in the cloud.
You don’t want to stall your cloud projects simply because you don’t understand what you need. So, 11:11 has developed Catalyst – a free, lightweight proprietary analytical tool that takes the guesswork out of cloud sizing.
