Cloud storage pricing: The cost of a hypothetical month of cloud data storage

Assume that an organization wants to store non-structured user data (documents, spreadsheets, etc.) in the cloud, starting with a 5 TB footprint

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in the first month. They will perform reads on 5% of the data per month, and writes on 3% of the data per month.

The growth rate of the data footprint in the cloud is expected to be 2% per month (these rates have been conveniently chosen to allow for the use of a dedicated T1 line for accessing data in the cloud). The cost per GB is $0.25 per month, and the cost per GB transferred is $0.10. For the sake of simplicity, metadata operations won't be charged.

 

Month 1  
Dedicated T1 line charge $200
Base storage charge for 5,120 GB $1,280
Cloud data transfer charges (reads/writes/adds) $51.20
Total charges for Month 1 $1,531

 

Month 2  
Dedicated T1 line charge $200
Base storage charge for 5,222 GB $1,306
Cloud data transfer charges (reads/writes/adds) $52.22
Total charges for Month 2 $1,558

Estimated cost to initially load 5,120 GB based on per-hour charge of $2.49 using USB 2.0 data rates: $62.25 (25 hours at 60 MB/sec sustained)

Learn more about the hidden costs of cloud storage.
 

This was first published in January 2010

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