Enhanced / Gold‑Offering Version

Red Oak Consulting is the UK’s leading independent HPC and Cloud consultancy, specialising in guiding organisations through the full lifecycle of their high‑performance computing environments. Our expertise spans strategy development, capacity expansion, optimisation, procurement, implementation, and fully managed services.

A clear understanding of your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is essential to ensuring that HPC investments align with both financial objectives and operational demands. When evaluating cloud adoption, a TCO analysis becomes even more critical—providing a direct comparison between on‑premises and cloud‑based HPC, accounting for variables such as scalability, elasticity, storage behaviours, operational efficiency and long‑term financial impact.

To empower organisations with accurate, decision‑ready insights, Red Oak Consulting has developed a specialised, industry-leading TCO model designed specifically for HPC environments. This model enables clients to uncover the true financial footprint of their HPC estate, understand cost drivers across the business, and make confident, evidence‑based investment decisions.

Our Two‑Phase TCO Methodology

Phase 1 — Establishing a True Economic Baseline

Traditional TCO models often rely solely on cash-accounting methods and typically underestimate true organisational cost by overlooking indirect or distributed expenses. Red Oak’s approach is more rigorous, holistic and financially aligned with enterprise governance standards.

We identify and validate all cost elements associated with delivering HPC, including:

• Full organisational cost of staffing (using complete capitation rates)
• Organisation‑wide operational expenditure
• Depreciation calculations for infrastructure
• Cost of capital considerations
• Applicable R&D tax credits
• Forward‑looking inflation modelling
• Opportunity costs related to investment decisions
• Alignment with corporate financial metrics such as internal rate of return (IRR)

This establishes a comprehensive and realistic baseline for the cost of delivering HPC services within your organisation.

Phase 2 — Translating Costs Into Service Output

Once the financial baseline is established, we analyse the technical performance of your HPC service to derive a comparable unit‑cost metric—typically cost per delivered core‑hour.
This assessment includes:

• System availability and utilisation levels
• Workload characteristics, including job size and runtime distributions
• Job queue and wait‑time behaviours
• Failure rates and system stability impacts

Through an iterative, risk‑balanced approach, we refine the model to reduce uncertainty and enhance precision—focusing effort where it improves confidence in the final results.

Deliverables

On completion of the engagement, you will receive:

• A full catalogue of cost input items, including data provenance and uncertainty estimates
• A whole‑life comparative TCO model for the representative workload
• A comprehensive slide deck detailing methodology, insights, assumptions and recommendations

All modelling assumptions—particularly those with the greatest influence on outcomes—will be clearly documented. These typically include:

• Workload evolution, mix and alignment to optimal Azure instance types
• Storage consumption and cost behaviours
• Expected rate of Azure price evolution
• Pricing model impacts (on‑demand, spot, reserved, etc.)

Project Dependencies

To ensure accurate and timely results, Red Oak Consulting will require access to suitably informed stakeholders who can:

• Provide historical workload and scheduler data
• Validate assumptions about future workload evolution
• Supply detailed information relating to existing cost items
• Represent stakeholder groups and, where applicable, participate in up to four interviews

Please note that the project will commence only once all required data has been provided. Delays in supplying scheduler logs may necessitate the use of industry averages.

Project Timescales

This engagement will be completed as a timeboxed exercise. Should additional analysis or extensions be required from the original project scope, this will be supported under a separate purchase order and charged at the agreed daily consultant rate.