Those under the cloud storage "hidden costs"

Cloud storage is a major force in cloud computing, and its emergence has dramatically reduced the costs associated with deployment, operations and scalable storage for users and applications. In the meantime, however, the monthly price per GB advertised by public providers is also quite attractive to users. Experienced users generally know that most providers charge for most services, and these costs are quickly added up as the business grows. Storage is different from them.

Sometimes these "hidden costs," which are referred to as cloud storage, are well-done by vendors and, of course, provide all the necessary information in a cloud storage contract. These costs do not surprise users if they do not do a cloud storage cost analysis or calculate the potential costs of a specific transaction.

In this tip, we'll examine the different categories of costs that are also where a customer's cloud storage service will cost.

The first is to store the prices on a monthly basis, usually quoted on a per gigabyte basis, and the price per gg will decrease as you increase your storage usage. For example, Amazon recently the first standard storage GB price is 9.5 cents / GB per month, followed by 49 GB is a monthly 8 cents / GB Microsoft Windows Azure uses a similar calculation ratio. Most major providers also charge for higher redundant storage, and some even now introduce a lower-cost archive storage option.

The second type of surcharges is for monthly storage requests or execution of the transaction. The request is a REST-based operation, also known as the HTTP method (or "verb"), which specifies the execution of an action on a storage object or resource. Common operations include GET, PUT, POST, LIST, and DELETE.

While Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure charge for such requests / transactions, other services like Rackspace Cloud File (based on OpenStack object store) and Nirvanix do not charge. We are not talking about large numbers, the highest fees tend to be between 0.01-0.05 cents, and 1,000 transactions are executed, depending on the provider and the specific operation. Of course, this can quickly increase when a customer uses the cloud for main storage or for any particular activity dataset.

The third and final category is the bandwidth cost of transferring data to and from the cloud. Now providers do not charge for data transfer, although you may have to pay an extra fee if you are transferring large amounts of data to the cloud via a data transfer service or a private network connection. On the other hand, providers are also almost the same for sending data out of the cloud.

In the case of Amazon S3, these costs start at 12 cents / GB (the first gigabyte free for the first month), declining as large monthly data flows out. If these costs justify your monthly transfer of just a few hundred gigabytes of data, they create a deterrent to transferring large data sets to other cloud storage providers. The largest cloud storage cost per month for a typical customer is by far the first type of cost. For example, if you use the 500GB standard in the western United States, redundant Amazon S3 storage, with an average of 100GB and 50,000 storage requests a month, pay $ 170 a month. If you use ten times (5TB) of your total storage per month, the transfers and requests are static, increasing the monthly cost to only $ 580.

While assessing the monthly cloud storage bill poses a challenge, the good news is that cloud provider costs have been steadily declining, and as the competition intensifies, the number of subscribers continues to grow. For example, Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3 recently announced a 25% reduction in storage prices without GB. The good news is that the same numbers, including Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure and Rackspace Cloud File, now offer easy-to-use calculators on the Web to help users Assess the cost of different scenarios.

Keep in mind there may be other costs. For example, if you use Cloud Gateway to access storage, you have to consider the cost of your site equipment (such as your gateway device) and the associated support and maintenance costs. You also need to calculate the cost of IT staff, they are responsible for the data stored in the cloud and management.

One of the trends you need to know is that some small, innovative providers are adopting entirely new ways to price cloud storage. For example, Symform. Instead of being priced solely in GB, Symform allows users to contribute additional local drive space to the Symform storage pool, reducing or even eliminating the cost per GB, depending on the stock of contributions. Cloud storage pools expand as new users grow as these users benefit by dramatically reducing the cost per GB. If there are some radical surprise, but it is compelling not, cloud storage expansion method and price model will appear within the next two years.

All in all, competition and innovation continue to lead to simpler and more functional cloud storage products at a lower price. The key to understanding costs is knowing your storage and conversion needs, focusing on the changes in these costs.

【Editor: Han Ying TEL: (010) 68476606】