How to Cut AI Infrastructure Costs by 74% with Domino

After years of IT sprawl and growth, a leading pharmaceutical company’s IT team leveraged Domino to cut its AI infrastructure costs without sacrificing performance and bottom-line impact.

Like many innovation-driven companies, AI was crucial to generating revenues but was also cost-intensive. With a massive growth in their user base, cloud costs were out of control and growing exponentially, and governance guardrails were minimal. This presented the perfect opportunity for IT to create a balance between maintaining user experience and dynamic workflows while lowering costs using Domino. As a result of this approach, the IT team shrunk costs by 74% and surprised themselves in the process.

Before Domino, this Fortune 500 pharma company had many on-premise data centers that were underutilized. Domino helped its IT team consolidate this infrastructure and boost utilization of on-premise, owned hardware (GPUs), which resulted in significant cost savings.

In addition, Domino helped the company to optimize its compute resources. The company was using different cloud providers, which made it difficult to manage its many cloud bills. Domino helped the company consolidate its cloud usage with a single pane of glass and cost reporting that was granular and made chargebacks seamless in one system of record. Domino also showed users compute pricing, motivating them to help save. All of these initiatives drove down compute costs.

Three Strategies for Reducing IT Spending

Increase User education and accountability: The IT team implemented a system of user accountability to ensure that users were aware of the costs associated with using the platform. This included educating users on optimizing their workloads and giving them tools to track their usage. Domino made it easier by sharing pricing for multiple cloud and instance types suitable for their project so they could make better decisions and choose to save.

Automated cost governance: IT implemented a set of policies and procedures to govern the use of the platform. These policies included things like setting limits on the number of workspaces that a user could create and requiring users to delete unused workspaces. Domino also offered an auto-shutdown feature that IT activated to save on idle compute time.

The team modified backend configurations, using Domino’s cost governance features to improve efficiency and reduce costs. This included resizing hardware tiers and optimizing data storage, so waste was reduced and the right resource was used for every job.

Right-size cloud spending: The IT team shrunk their cloud bills by negotiating better pricing with their cloud providers, using reserved instances to get discounted pricing, automating cloud management to reduce errors, and using cloud cost management tools and granular cost reports from Domino to track spending (by user, team, project), and identify areas for savings.

By implementing a framework for user accountability, establishing governance policies, and optimizing your backend configurations, you can achieve significant cost savings.

As a result of these strategies and the use of Domino, the company not only reduced its IT infrastructure and compute costs by 74%, it also decreased elastic file storage by 23% and reduced backup costs by 90%, saving millions in unnecessary expenses. This freed up IT resources to support core business objectives and helped IT do more with less.

How Domino Shrinks IT Infrastructure Costs

Domino pays for itself by shrinking infrastructure costs by 40% on average, optimizing resource use, and reducing waste with intelligent monitoring and controls, including:

• On-demand compute with guardrails like intelligent workspace sizing, hardware limits, and storage quotas
• Auto-shutdown and auto-pausing for workspaces so they are not left idle
• Auto-scaling clusters that accelerate time-to-value for high-priority work and save staff hours
• Access to the lowest-cost compute across on-premise, hybrid, and multi-cloud infrastructure
• Precise billing reports that track costs by user, project, cluster, hardware tiers, and more to help you enforce budgets, reconcile cloud bills, and simplify chargebacks/showbacks
• Customizable budgets for storage and compute that you can override for specific teams and projects
• Spending alerts to prevent cost overruns when spending runs hot

Read the Definitive Cost Savings eBook and watch the Cost Governance demo video to learn more.

About Domino: Domino is a cloud-based AI and MLOps platform that helps organizations govern and optimize their IT resources to drastically reduce AI and data science infrastructure costs. Learn about Domino’s Cost Governance solutions here.