Never Buy Another Server for Dynamics NAV
I’ve often asked myself why the prices for cloud computing for Dynamics NAV (Navision) haven’t dropped in line with Microsoft and Amazon price decreases. I set out to answer that question and what I discovered has now convinced me that no one should ever buy another physical server to run NAV ever again.
Starting with Dynamics NAV 2016 and later we can now use Azure SQL which eliminates the need to license Microsoft SQL separately on either a physical or virtual machine. The cost savings using Azure SQL means that we can now run NAV 2016 or later on Azure SQL from a half to a quarter of the cost of traditional hosting or running it on premise. In addition to an Azure Subscription the only other thing you need is an SSL Certificate.
To see for yourself all you need to do is go to the Azure Pricing Calculator.
For a standard configuration that should easily support 25 users, all you need is an Azure Windows Virtual Machine and an Azure SQL Database. I’m including a screen shot of the configuration below so that you can replicate my configuration in the pricing calculator. You’ll notice that the estimated monthly cost is only $283.32 per month. What is even more amazing is that for this price you can also use point-in-time restore as far back as 35 days along with the ability to restore databases from geo-redundant copies of recent backups, or failover to database replicas in a different region. To create that kind of capability in a hosting or an on premise environment is often cost prohibitive.
Figure 1 – Azure SQL Server Pricing Configuration for Dynamics NAV 2016
Hopefully, once you do your own analysis, you’ll come to the same conclusion that I did. That no one should ever buy another NAV server again. If you would like to learn more please feel free to contact the Azure experts at ArcherPoint.