Managing the Cost of Cloud Storage

If you’re looking seriously at storage in the Cloud – or if you are already using Cloud capacity – you’re probably entertaining dueling price quotes from suppliers. As Cloud storage providers fight for every customer dollar, one of the primary competitive differentiators is price. With the level of competition seen today, prices are dropping. Sounds a lot like “supply” and “demand”.

Amazon has sliced storage prices. Google recently cut the price on Google Cloud Storage by up to 15 percent in some cases. Is a Google/Amazon price war next?

Amazon Web Services cut S3 storage prices and discounted Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services. Standard Google Cloud Storage now costs a bit less than Amazon S3 and Microsoft Windows Azure storage. But of course an “apples to apples” comparison is extremely difficult because the price of Cloud storage is tiered into different per-GB fees for data stored, plus network charges for data flowing into and out of the Cloud and “special request” costs.

Google’s pricing details are here but at the time this material was assembled, the price for standard storage starts at $0.12 per GB stored per month ($1.44 per GB per year). Data transfer into the network is free, but out of the network is $0.12 per GB for up to 1 TB. Standard Amazon S3 storage costs $0.125 per GB for up to 1 TB of total storage per month. AWS reduced redundancy storage is less, $0.093 per GB for up to the first TB. AWS does not charge for data transfer into the cloud but does charge for transfer out, after the first gigabyte. Microsoft Windows Azure storage is $0.125 per GB for up to 50 TB per month.

As mentioned previously, making an “apples to apples” comparison is extremely difficult.

Carl Brooks, an analyst for the Tier1Research division of The 451 Group says: “It’s not the storage that kills; it’s the network [fees]. You can put data in the cloud for $0.12/GB per month, but they charge you network fees to get it out again, and charge you a penny per 1000 transactions. A moderately popular website could do thousands of transactions per second, every second of the day. Cloud is great for archiving, less so for busy applications,” he said.

But do you really want to wait for Cloud pricing to race to the bottom? With complex pricing algorithms and less than perfect market knowledge about price levels because of that complexity, how long will it take for supply and demand to reach equilibrium?

Our customers are telling us that they don’t want to wait. They want to manage the cost of their Cloud storage down – and they want to do it now!

That is precisely what BridgeSTOR does for them. The Data Deduplication File System (DDFS) embedded in NAS products and CRUNCH give them the tools they need to achieve Cloud capacity and bandwidth savings without waiting for the Cloud providers to duke it out.

How BridgeSTOR Drives Cloud Costs Down

If your Cloud-based virtual machine image storage does not include a solid data deduplication strategy, you’re using too much storage hardware, too much bandwidth and spending more money than you need to.

Let BridgeSTOR help you electronically transport your virtual machine images from the data center to the Cloud. Depending on the number and size of your virtual machine images, you can choose to populate your Cloud offsite disaster recovery suite over the WAN using deduplicated data and BridgeSTOR’s Cloud Plug-In™ or by a one-time batch load using deduplicated virtual tape cartridges.

Since BridgeSTOR’s DDFS technology is capable of reducing the size of a collection of virtual machine images, you won’t need nearly as much disk hardware capacity to store the deduplicated data or as much bandwidth to keep your virtual machine images “refreshed”.

BridgeSTOR can help. Just call for more details, to arrange a hands-on “show and tell”, to arrange an on-site demonstration or to receive a quote.