"Hidden cost" analysis of cloud storage

The advent of cloud storage is accompanied by significant reductions in deployment, operations, and scalable storage costs for users and applications. But at the same time, the monthly price per gigabyte published by public providers is almost always fatal, and experienced users know that most providers charge for most services, and that, in addition to storage, these costs are quickly added to the growing business.

Sometimes these are called "hidden costs" of cloud storage, but the vendors do a decent job of providing all the necessary information in a cloud storage contract. These hidden costs don't surprise users if they don't do a cloud storage cost analysis or calculate the potential cost of a specific transaction.

In this tip, we'll examine the different classifications of costs that are a cost to a customer's cloud storage service.

The first category is the monthly storage price, usually quoted per GB. Some providers, each GB price will decrease as you increase your storage use cases. For example, Amazon's most recent standard storage GB price is 9.5 cents a month GB, followed by 49 GB per month 8 Cents GB. Microsoft Windows Azure uses a similar calculation ratio. Most major providers also charge more for higher redundant storage, and some now even introduce lower-cost archive storage choices.

The second type of surcharge is for monthly storage requests or transactions performed. A request is a rest-based operation, also known as an HTTP method (or "verb (verb)"), that specifies a storage object or action execution on a resource. Common operations include get, put, POST, list, and delete.

Although Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure charge for such request/transaction (requests/transactions), other services such as Rackspace Cloud file (Cloud file) (based on OpenStack object storage) And Nirvanix are not charged. We are not talking about big numbers, the highest costs tend to be between 0.01 and 0.05 cents, and the execution of 1000 transactions depends on the provider and the specific operation. Of course, these can grow quickly when a customer uses the cloud for primary storage or any particular active dataset.

The third and final category is the bandwidth cost of transmitting data to the cloud or pulling data out of the cloud. The provider now does not charge for data transfers, although if you transfer large amounts of data to the cloud via a data transfer service or a dedicated network connection, you may need to pay an extra fee. On the other hand, providers are almost unanimously charging for sending data out of the cloud.

In the case of Amazon S3, these costs start with 12 cents GB (the first GB free per month), with the monthly large data outflows gradually falling. These costs are reasonable if you only transfer hundreds of gigabytes of data per month, but they create a restraining factor for transferring large datasets to other cloud storage providers. The largest monthly cloud storage cost for a typical customer so far is the first category. For example, if you use the 500GB standard, redundant Amazon S3 storage in the western part of the United States, the average monthly transfer of 100GB and 50,000 storage requests, a monthly payment of 170 dollars. If you use 10 times times the total storage per month (5TB), the transmission and request is static, and the monthly cost is only increased to 580 U.S. dollars.

While it is challenging to assess monthly cloud storage bills, the good news is that the cost of cloud providers is steadily falling, and as the competition heats up, the number of subscribers continues to increase. For example, Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3 recently announced that storage prices have not been cut by GB by 25%. The other good news is that the number of ditto, including Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure and Rackspace Cloud file now offers Easy-to-use calculators on the web, Help users assess the cost of their different scenarios.

Remember there may be other costs. For example, if you use a cloud gateway to access storage, you must consider the cost of the site's equipment (such as gateway Equipment), as well as associated support and maintenance costs. You also need to calculate the cost of IT staff, who are responsible for storing and managing the data in the cloud.

One of the trends you need to know is that some small and innovative providers are using a new approach to pricing cloud storage. Symform for example. Not single in GB, Symform allows users to contribute additional local drive space to the symform storage pool, reducing or even eliminating the cost per gigabyte, depending on the amount of contribution. The cloud storage pool expands in line with the growth of new users, who benefit by drastically reducing the cost per gigabyte. If there's some activism, don't be surprised, but it's compelling, isn't it? The cloud storage extension methods and price models will emerge in the next two years.

In short, competition and innovation will lead to simpler and more functional cloud storage products that are cheaper. The key to understanding costs is knowing your storage and transformation needs and focusing on these cost changes.