This document provides 10 tips to help clients save over 50% on their IT purchases. The tips include not getting confused by marketing terms, ignoring hype, knowing your actual needs and options, doing an intelligent evaluation of vendors, understanding the differences between colocation and hosting, dedicated and shared servers, appropriate pricing, and knowing when to ask for help from experts. Following these tips helps ensure the right IT solution is selected based on technical and business requirements.

1. 10 Tips
That Have Saved Our Clients
Over 50%
On Their Recent IT Purchases
…And Will Help You Save $$ Too!

2. 10 Tips
1. Don’t Get Confused
2. Ignore The Marketing
3. Ignore The Hype
4. Know What You Actually Need
5. Know Your Options
6. Do an Intelligent Evaluation
7. Colo vs. Hosting
8. Dedicated vs. Shared
9. Know What You Should Pay
10. Know When To Ask For Help

3. 1. Don’t Get Confused
≠ Cloud
≠ Cloud
(1) Salesforce = SaaS delivered within a hybrid shared
elastic hosting environment
(2) AWS = IaaS creating a hybrid shared elastic
hosting environment

4. 2. Ignore the Marketing
When people say “cloud”, what most really mean is
shared elastic hosting. The term “cloud computing” is
pure marketing hype.
An elastic computing environment is achieved via the virtualization
and automation of physical IT infrastructure so that the host
environment can quickly respond to fluctuations in the demand for
resources.
The question thus should be, “Is elastic hosting really the
best solution for you right now…
…and 12 months from now?”

5. 3. Ignore the Hype
People often highlight the flexibility of elastic solutions and
feel it is a one size fits all solution, but forget that there are
some serious drawbacks such as:
(1) Lack of control and customization
(2) Lack of proactive monitoring
(3) Lack of application and data mobility
(4) Increased costs as compute utilization scales
While elastic hosting has yielded real savings for SOME, and is
ideal for specific use cases and during specific stages of a
company’s growth, it is NOT the optimal solution for ALL

6. 4. Know What You Actually Need
Rather than asking what your “cloud” strategy should be, you should
instead be asking:
(1) Is this solution cost efficient? Are there other solutions
available that will provide the same or better value?
(2) Will this service be reliable? How will a service outage effect
my business?
(3) How am I notified if there is a service interruption? What is
the process of bringing my application back up again after an
outage?
Asking the right questions will help you determine
which of the many available hosting solutions and
options are right for you

7. 4. Know What You Actually Need (cont.)
(1) Which is more critical now;
Your Application or Your Infrastructure?
(2) How much backend control do you really need?
(3) What skill-sets and experience does your existing team
have to control, manage and scale your backend efficiently?
(4) What are your applications detailed compute, power and
network requirements today?
(5) How will these requirements change as your business
scales?

8. 5. Know Your Options
(1) Space (3) Connectivity (4) Hardware
~Retail Colocation ~ Transit ~ Servers
~Wholesale Colocation ~ Transport ~ Cabling
~ Peering ~ Switches
(2) Hosting ~ CDN ~ Routers
~ Dedicated vs. Shared ~ Storage
~ Managed vs. Unmanaged
~ Elastic (5) Eyes & Hands
~ Hybrid ~ Remote Support
~ On-Site Support
There are endless ways to customize these resources.
What makes the most sense for your specific technical and
business requirements?

9. 5. Know Your Options (cont..)
Space Hosting Connectivity CDN Hardware
365 Main Azzure Abovenet Akamai Anixter
Arcscale AWS AT&T AT&T Cisco
BAIS ElasticStack Bandcon AWS Citrix
Cogent ENKI Centurylink Bandcon Dell
Coloserve Hosting.com Global Crossing BitGravity Enterasys
Corelink Hostway Hurricane Electric Brightbox Hitachi
Coresite Internap Level 3 Cachefly HP
DRT Layeredtech Nitel Cotendo IBM
Equinix Latysis NTT Edgecast Juniper
I/O Peak Web PacNet Highwinds Oracle
Internap Peer1 Packet Exchange Level 3 Redapt
Interxion Rackspace Savvis Limelight SGI
Latisys ServerCentral Splice NTT Super Micro
Layer 42 SingleHop Sprint Pando Networks
Navisite Softlayer Tata PlayStream
Savvis Sungard Telstra Rackspace
TeleHouse Terramark TW Telecom Softlayer
Vantage QTS Verizon Tata
QTS Qwest XO Voxel
What are the differences between them all?!

10. 6. Intelligent Evaluation
This matrix on hosting companies is a simple example.
Your matrix will not fit on a single page.
Vendors Enterprise Dedicated Shared Elastic Consulting SLA Cost Footprint
Rackspace Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes $ US
ENKI Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes $ US
AWS Yes Yes Yes Yes $ ‐ $$ US, EU
Softlayer Yes Yes Yes Yes $$ US, EU, ASIA
Peak Web Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes $ US
Joyent Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes $$ US, ASIA
SunGard Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes $$$ US, EU
GAE Yes Yes Yes Yes $ ‐ $$ US
BlueHost No Yes $ US
GoDaddy No Yes $ US
There are many other factors to be considered,
based on your specific technical and business requirements.

11. 7. Colo vs. Hosting
Elastic Hosting Colo
Colo
~ Full control
~ Billed for space & power
~ Billed as rent
~ Can be Cap Ex heavy
Hosting
~ Less control
Cost
~ Billed for capacity
~ Billed as rent
~ Op Ex heavy
Elastic
~ Even less control
~ Billed for capacity
~ Billed as utility
~ Op Ex heavy
Capacity
NOTE: Your application’s compute, network and power needs may
drastically change the inflection points above!

12. 8. Dedicated vs. Shared
Dedicated Shared
~ Full control ~ Less control
~ More customization ~ Less customization
~ More secure ~ Less secure
~ Less elastic ~ More elastic
Server 1
Server 2
Server 3
Server 4
RAM | Compute | Storage RAM | Compute | Storage
Dedicated on a single server Shared across many servers

13. 9. Know What You Should Pay
(1) What is the average market price for your
specific requirements in the region you are
in? Are you paying for services you don’t
want or need?
(2) What billing methods can you leverage to your
advantage? Is your billing method optimized
for your usage patterns?
(3) What are the vendor-side factors that can and
will affect your pricing?

14. 10. Know When to Ask for Help
No metrics Have experience Limited experience
Maybe. If only to see
Yes! You definitely need
what other options are
help.
out there...
Have metrics
Likely not. You probably
Yes! You definitely need
have things figured out
help.
by now...
You and your business may be complex and unique, but you are not alone.
We ask the questions and present the options that will save you $$
on your next IT Infrastructure purchase or migration.

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• Partner Agnostic Email us at team@openspectruminc.com
• Confidential Or call 408.482.9953
• Transparent