Steve Duplessie posts on Cloud Economics and especially the economics of Cloud Storage, 20 TBs of storage from Amazon's S3 cloud will cost you $36,000 a year and that doesn't necessarily compare especially well with purchasing your own array. So do the economics of the Cloud storage scale, especially when we start talking about the 100s of terabytes of storage which many enterprises consume?
The problem is we don't really know how much it costs us per terabyte in total! There are no good published TCO models for storage; this is why the initiative started by Nick Pearce and Ian are so important. Go and read their blogs here and here on building a TCO model for storage; let's get this thing crowd-sourced and perhaps we can make the TCO costs of storage a little less cloudy.
And then we can start on the model for Cloud TCO…public vs private etc!!
I’m not sure that it’s not a good deal. Not only do you have to buy disks, but you’ve got to maintain them when they break, you’ve got to pay for the space to put them (either in a colo or in your own high-availability datacenter), and then you’ve got to pay for people to go run wires, replace disks, etc.
I’m still not going to take the jump, yet. I don’t have the evidence, but I don’t think the price scales down as well to my level. I should look into at some point.
We looked at cloud for storage & CPU and the capital cost was about a 3-6 month break-even point of out right buying it; and nobody was willing to sign up for any SLA at that price either. That doesn’t include admins, datacenter, power/cooling just what it takes to outright buy the pieces of tin around CPU’s & hardware…
I think at this time the process only really works $$ wise in the small SMB environments or where you have a variable workload that you have a very good understanding of it and can use cloud to augment peak capacity for a short period of time (i.e. christmas retail rush, etc).
If you want to talk outside of raw asset dollars with value of time to market, etc. things get fuzzier with the business willing to pay significantly more than the cost of acquisition. If I’ve got to wait for 3 months because my IT dept is buried, datacenter being upgraded, vendor supply backlog… it may be worth it to the business to get it done quicker but they are going to pay more to get it done (which might be offset by time to market).