ITS Cloud News

Dear ITS Private Cloud customer,

I am writing on behalf of EIS to share some upcoming changes to our private cloud hosting service rates and billing procedures that will come into effect May 1st, 2023.

First, we are pleased to be part of your private cloud solutions at the university and are committed to the ongoing of improvement to our services to meet your changing needs.

As part of our commitment to service improvement, we are excited to announce that we will be transitioning from the current advanced annual billing model to a usage-based monthly billing model for the ITS Private Cloud service. The new monthly billing model will more accurately reflect the consumption of compute, memory and storage infrastructure from month to month. Departments will now be able to see, with greater granularity, the effect on cost when configuration changes are made.

In order to meet the demands of our ambitious community and remain consistent through the recent period of pandemic upheaval, we postponed necessary rate increases for our services. We must now update our rates from the current 2017 benchmark to reflect increases in the cost of server and storage infrastructure, software licensing, and staffing over the past 5 years.

We know these changes can be challenging to manage. To that end, we will be implementing the rate increase in a phased approach over the next three years. Departments are invited to take this time to budget for the increases and/or adjust their usage of our services accordingly. Please see the chart below listing the new rates for 2023 – 2025 as well as additional details on new storage tiers and their respective pricing.

My sincere thanks for partnering with us to provide secure, on premises ‘private cloud’ services at the university. We are committed to providing our customers with the highest level of service and support. We will continue to identify opportunities for improvement and welcome your feedback as we develop our cloud service offerings.

Patrick Hopewell

New ITS Private Cloud Pricing

Key Takeaways

• EIS rates are competitive with public cloud hosting solutions, especially when associated costs including bandwidth are factored in.
• EIS includes bandwidth free of charge.
• Note the 3 new tiers of storage which have different rates: HDD (spinning hard disk), SSD (solid state disk) and iSCSI (iSCSI attached block storage).
• The type of storage allocated can be selected when virtual machines are created (note: iSCSI storage must be arranged by special request and cannot be selected as an option).