What Does Staying on Broadcom Actually Cost You?

This model reflects real-world enterprise pricing behavior and modernization patterns observed across mid-market and enterprise infrastructure environments.

Base TCO model

• Broadcom VCF licensing is modeled such that each CPU is billed at a minimum of 16 cores, regardless of actual physical core count. Your selected per-core rate is applied to this billable core count.
• Nutanix NCI software is priced at $140/core/year, applied only to actual physical cores with no minimum uplift.
• Current-state storage maintenance costs are included in the current environment TCO and eliminated in the AIM path, which assumes a full storage refresh.
• Hardware costs in the target state — compute, storage, and networking — are modeled based on current enterprise market pricing for the selected configuration and are shown transparently in the cost detail. Both paths assume a full refresh; the delta comes from licensing and managed services, not hardware.
• Storage effective capacity is modeled using a 5:1 average data reduction ratio, consistent with all-flash array performance for typical enterprise workloads.
• All savings values are rounded to the nearest thousand for clarity.

Node consolidation

• The target environment is derived internally using a fixed 2:1 consolidation ratio — your current node count is halved (minimum 3 nodes) to determine the recommended target footprint. This reflects conservative enterprise HCI consolidation benchmarks.
• The recommended UCS platform generation is selected automatically based on your current RAM per node: M5 (up to 3 TB/node), M6 (up to 6 TB/node), or M7 (up to 8 TB/node). The calculator defaults to M6 unless RAM density requires M7 or fits within M5.
• Target configurations always use 2-socket nodes at the maximum core count for the recommended generation, maximizing workload density and licensing efficiency.
• Node consolidation savings are not added separately to the headline TCO comparison — they are already captured through the difference between the current-environment hardware refresh cost and the smaller target-state hardware investment. The consolidation breakdown shown in results uses industry benchmarks ($3,000/node/yr for power and cooling, $2,000/node/yr for maintenance contracts) to make the components transparent, not to add them again.

VMC Bridge

• Approximately 10% of workloads with VMware API dependencies are assumed to require a transition bridge to AWS during migration. This cost is unique to the Aegis path and is disclosed transparently.
• The VMC bridge is modeled as a time-limited transition expense that exits at the end of Year 1. Actual scope depends on workload assessment.

IaC & operational efficiency

• IaC efficiency values are presented separately from base TCO savings and clearly labeled as operational value — not infrastructure cost reduction.
• VM density is estimated at approximately 12 VMs per node, consistent with enterprise consolidation ratios for general-purpose workloads.
• Labor hours recovered cover VM provisioning, change management, incident investigation, firmware and patch cycles, and audit and compliance preparation — scaled proportionally from a validated 12-node reference model.
• Staff burdened labor rate is modeled at $135/hr fully-loaded, inclusive of salary, benefits, and overhead. This is the only labor rate used in the model.
• Incident avoidance is modeled on industry benchmark data for environments with and without automated drift detection and change collision prevention.
• Time-to-value acceleration reflects the difference between manual and automated deployment cycles for revenue-bearing workloads in comparable enterprise environments.
• Aegis managed services and VMC bridge costs are unique to the Aegis path. These are transparently deducted from the IaC efficiency value — not hidden in the base TCO headline.
• All operational benchmarks are conservative estimates. Actual results vary by environment, team composition, and workload mix.