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On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Edward M. Corrado <[log in to unmask]>wrote: > Nate Vack wrote: > >> On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 1:57 PM, Ryan Ordway<[log in to unmask]> >> wrote: >> >> >>> $213,360 over 3 years >>> >>> >> If you're ONLY looking at storage costs, SATA drives in enterprise RAID >>> systems range from about $1.00/GB to about $1.25/GB for online storage. >>> >> >> Yeah -- but if you're looking only at storage costs, you'll have an >> inaccurate estimate of your costs. You've got power, cooling, sysadmin >> time, and replacements for failed disks. If you want an >> apples-to-apples comparison, you'll want an offsite mirror, as well. >> >> I'm not saying S3 is always cost-effective -- but in our experience, >> the costs of the disks themselves is dwarfed by the costs of the >> related infrastructure. >> >> I agree that the cost of storage is only one factor. I have to wonder > though, how much more staff time do you need for local storage than cloud > storage? I don't know the answer but I'm not sure it is much more than > setting up S3 storage, especially if you have a good partnership with your > storage vendor. Support relationships, especially regarding storage are very costly. When I worked at a midsize datacenter, we implemented a backup solution with STORServer and tivoli. Both hardware and software were considerably costly. Initial and ongoing support, while indispensable was basically as much as the cost of the hardware every few years. > With cloud storage you still need other backups and mirrors, so I don't see > the off-site mirror as an argument in favor of the cloud. You should have > that redundancy either way. You have the original, and the copy, wherever it is. So you can build rack elsewhere (and reintroduce power, cooling, security and bandwidth costs), or get a tape rotation scheme in place, or whatever, but a cloud-based backup is already offsite, whereas an in-house tape library (like our STORServer) still requires a staffer to populate the lockbox to be picked up (we used Iron Mountain, then later Cintas). > Yes, maybe you save on staff time patching software on your storage array, > but that is not a significant amount of time - esp. since you are still > going to have some local storage, and there isn't much difference in staff > time in doing 2 TB vs. 20 TB. There's a real difference. I can get 2 TB in a single HDD, for example this one for $200 at NewEgg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148413 <http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148413> Any high school kid can install that. 20 TB requires some kind of additional structure and additional expertise. You may some time on the initial configuration, but you still need to > configure cloud storage. Is cloud storage that much easier/less time > consuming to configure than an iSCSI device? Replacement for disks would be > covered under your warranty or support contract (at least I would hope you > would have one). Warranties expire and force you into ill-timed, hardly-afforded and dangerous-to-your-data upgrades. Sorta like some ILS systems with which we are all familiar. The cloud doesn't necessarily stay the same, but the part you care about (data in, data out) does. > The power and cooling can be a savings, but in many cases the library or > individual departments don't pay for electricity, so while *someone* pays > the cost, it might not be the individual department. Cooling and electricity > costs are an actually a great argument for tape for large-scale storage. > Tape might seem old fashioned, but in many applications it by far offers the > best value of long term storage per GB. It's true, tape is still an worthwhile option. Alternatives like optical or magneto-optical media just have not kept up. Again, I'm not totally against the cloud and there are some things I think > it could be very useful for, but the cloud doesn't make up for the lack of > (or just bad) planning. Yeah, there's no system good enough to compensate for bad planning and management. --Joe