George Crump just blogged about the reliability of cloud storage; as he points out, anything you store “in the cloud” will go down or be unreachable at one time or another. I personally think most companies storing data with cloud storage providers such as Amazon’s S3 or Rackspace’s Cloud Files realize this might happen, and plan accordingly; but still the “Hybrid Cloud Storage” solution proposed by Crump might be worth investigating:
[...] a hybrid cloud is an appliance that is placed on the customer’s site to act as a intermediary storage location for data that is in route to the cloud. The appliance serves many purposes: translation from CIFS/NFS to more internet friendly protocols, local cache for rapid restores of last copy of a backup or archive and as a place to get to data that would otherwise be inaccessible due to some sort of connection issue.
But I find myself asking this simple question again and again: “why would you store your data in a cloud“? Access to your files is slower. You have less control over your data. You can’t drive to a data center and pick up your servers if you want to switch suppliers. You get an SLA that only returns 25% of what you paid if the service is down for days. And it’s more expensive in the long run.
So I think the use of S3 and similar services will stay limited to “extra” offsite backups and small users for which setting up their own storage environment is still too expensive. For almost every other use, building and maintaining your own storage system will generally be more affordable and faster. To give you some numbers:
Suppose you have 100 TB of data that you’d like to have archived at a second location. It’s not your primary data, so performance isn’t that much of an issue; if it were you wouldn’t be considering S3 either.
- Storing this on S3 would cost you $14,848 per month, excluding transfer fees
- That is over $175k per year
- For the same price, you can pick up three Sun Fire X4540′s, giving you some headroom in terms of storage space, leaving enough money to rent half a rack in a data center somewhere to run these
- Just imagine the savings starting in the second year… And the Sun’s are just an example; especially in the current economic climate, this amount of money should be able to buy you some nice storage systems from any number of vendors. StorageMojo has a nice collection of price lists for those interested!
Sun Fire X4540
The one place where S3 will probably continue to gain market share is temporary storage; if you just need to store your files for a couple of days or months, or you are not sure about how big a project will become, using S3 or EC2 instances with Elastic Storage might make sense. But there is going to be major pricing pressure for Amazon in the near future!
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The poster children for cloud storage have been online services, such as photo sharing or file downloads, that don't really need local access but need to deliver data directly to end users across the Internet. S3 will give you bandwidth and storage on demand so if you're capital strapped and don't know how rapidly you will grow it could be the right thing.
That said, S3's pricing has always been high and it just keeps looking worse and worse as the cost of storage declines. On the other hand, I'm sure that Amazon has a hefty profit margin so any competitors should be prepared from Amazon to drop prices rapidly if they start to take significant amounts of business away from Amazon.
[...] a TCO model for storage It looks like I’m not alone in wondering whether or not cloud storage offers any financial advantages over storing your files in your own systems. Martin [...]