
Cloud Storage Isn’t Cheap: Price of the Cloud Compared to Traditional Storage - jnoller
https://www.nasuni.com/news/nasuni-blog/cloud-storage-isnt-cheap-how-the-price-of-cloud-storage-compares-to-traditional-storage/
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petrilli
The difficulty sometimes in comparing is, as this post points out, people
don't include all the "other" costs that often dwarf the hardware costs.
Power, cooling, bandwidth, etc., all cost money, and when you're not buying a
lot of them, they cost a LOT of money. The cost of equipment is usually a
fraction of the TCO.

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bradleyland
I found the article kind of strange. The author spends a lot of time and
effort building up math that makes the case for rolling your own NAS, but then
softens up when tearing that case down. Nasuni is a cloud storage company, so
I'm a little confused.

It appears that the author reached the correct conclusion: the correct
solution considers the requirements before arriving at a solution. IMO, the
article would be much clearer if it focused on a specific use case. There are
many different situations that require large amounts of storage.

If you run a video production studio, it probably makes more sense to use a
local NAS like NetApp, because you're going to move a lot of data every single
day. The bandwidth costs are going to eat your lunch. In that case, a local
NAS makes sense.

If you run a website, cloud storage makes a lot more sense. All of your bits
are going to go across the wire, so whether your NAS is local is less
significant. Having the data closer to users and maintaining a high level of
up-time is more important.

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jnoller
It's important to note that the Nasuni product (I am employee) makes cloud
storage behave very much like local storage. We're not a "cloud storage"
company so much as a gateway to enable companies to securely use cloud storage
and have it behave like a local NAS.

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motters
Essentially the value proposition of the cloud is "we can store that for you
wholesale".

If you're just a typical internet user then it's probably not worth storing
data in the cloud, since hard drives/USB/Flash storage is a cheaper option,
but companies can save money on the overheads of maintaining and administering
very large volumes of data. For a company, storing data in the cloud is not
especially safe, but then there are also risks associated with local
administration too.

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jnoller
Storing data in the cloud _can_ and _should_ be safe though, the ideas of
economy of scale, and secure storage should not be mutually exclusive.

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Smrchy
The main pro for storing data in the cloud. Let's say on Amazon S3 is that you
also get a web server that is able to serve those same files (public or
secure). Even if you need them served to millions of users. You don't have to
care about scaling this thing. Good luck doing this with a NAS.

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matdwyer
I think another key thing is in three years the price of storage will keep
falling (as it has over the last X years), and with Amazon they are eating
that cost (hopefully) and not sticking you with old outdated hardware.

Kind of like leasing a car, but the cars get 10x better every year

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rarrrrrr
FYI -- There are cloud storage services that focus less on low-latency and
more on affordable reliability/throughput for archival class data.
<https://spideroak.com/diy/>

(disclosure: I cofounded SpiderOak in 2007)

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tghw
That's why BackBlaze builds their own servers:
[http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-
budget-h...](http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-
to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/)

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RexRollman
To me, an end user, the main benefit to Cloud based storage is that it is
offsite.

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motters
That benefit is also a risk though if your data in the cloud isn't encrypted.
Also if most company data is stored in a highly centralised way in cloud
server farms then this becomes a very conspicuous target for "cyber warfare".

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anamax
> Also if most company data is stored in a highly centralised way in cloud
> server farms then this becomes a very conspicuous target for "cyber
> warfare".

Yes, AWS is a bigger target than Joe's Burgers, but the question is whether
Joe will do a better job protecting his data than Amazon does.

I suspect that AWS is more secure for most values of "Joe".

