The reason I wrote this article was from a customer who wanted to know whether the cost to store a petabyte of storage in the cloud or on premise for 3 years. My first thought was the cloud, and I am only talking about storing the data, the pricing excludes the Egress and Ingress charges that would make cloud storage much more expensive.
In order for us to compare an on-premise solution vs a cloud solution we need to establish a few criteria. We chose to use Microsoft Azure Blob Storage for both Hot and Cool pricing and purchased a 3-year reserved blob – Flat Namespace – LRS – UK South:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/storage/blobs/
The quoted price surprised me as it was considerably more than I had been expecting. I then compared this to a Seagate Exos® CORVAULT™ populated with a total of 106 Exos drives!
Exos® CORVAULT™ is a high-performing, efficient, durable multi-petabyte capacity block storage system that is self-healing and brings five-nines availability to scale out storage for data centre deployments. CORVAULT breakthrough technologies provide hyperscale efficiencies, rapid deployment, and automatic hard drive renewal for less e-waste and operational costs.
Now we get the surprising part, the price for the Seagate Exos CORVAULT with 3 years 24x7 support and maintenance is £50,000 and it fits in 4U!
2000W x 24 hours x 365 days x 0.35 kW/h x 3 years = £18,396
The total cost is a £68,396 for 3 years!
Advantages | Disadvantages |
---|---|
No infrastructure to worry about | Increasing costs |
Easy to scale | Additional Charges |
No energy bills to pay | WAN Performance |
Vendor Lock-In | |
Data Security | |
Downtime |
Advantages | Disadvantages |
---|---|
Performance | Rack space, power, cooling |
Fixed costs | Back-end infrastructure |
No additional charges | |
Control | |
No WAN costs |
On-premise storage worked out to be.
This comparison really did throw up an unexpected result as unlike the cloud you don’t pay any additional charges data transfer charges.
Do you want to know the best bit about this price comparison? The Seagate CORVAULT pricing was for 2 Petabyte of data storage 😉.
If you want to know more about the Seagate CORVAULT then contact us using the details below.