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Google Storage Now Available To Developers

code.google.com

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Re: Google Storage Now Available To Developers

#11
post #8
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost of storing data: S3: $0.140 per GB (at the most expensive rate) vs. Google: $0.17 per GB (at their only listed rate) The rest seems to be the same though.

Fascinating, so a 1TB sata drive is $70 [1] these days and that equates to about 7 cents per GB, if you made three copies to insure your backups had a 'good' copy that would be 21 cents/gB so its cheaper than using your own hard drives. The whole 'we've decided to kill that product, you've got 30 days to get your stuff back' and the 'we lost a switch or something and we'll be back online day after tomorrow' kinds of…

Your comparison assumes that the average lifetime of a hard drive is 1 month. I sure hope that's not the case!

Also, don't forget bandwidth charges if e.g. some of your s3 access does not come from ec2.

Re: Google Storage Now Available To Developers

#15
post #11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating, so a 1TB sata drive is $70 [1] these days and that equates to about 7 cents per GB, if you made three copies to insure your backups had a 'good' copy that would be 21 cents/gB so its cheaper than using your own hard drives. The whole 'we've decided to kill that product, you've got 30 days to get your stuff back' and the 'we lost a switch or something and we'll be back online day after tomorrow' kinds of…

Your comparison assumes that the average lifetime of a hard drive is 1 month. I sure hope that's not the case! Also, don't forget bandwidth charges if e.g. some of your s3 access does not come from ec2.

Oh it gets much worse if you assume that you replace your hard drives every 3 years (their warranty period) which would add a $1.94/month depreciation cost.

You could add into the cost / GB of bandwidth to access the files, not as easy to factor into a TCO model in the personal use case.

Re: Google Storage Now Available To Developers

#17
post #10

A compelling reason for our use case to switch from S3 is their support for lots of buckets coupled with CNAME support: http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/reference-uris.html Due to Amazon's limitation of 100 buckets per account and the coupling between bucket name and CNAME, hosting files for our clients and supporting custom CNAMEs has not been possible for us. If we were to move to Google Storage, it would b…

I just wish either one would support SSL for CNAMEd buckets.

Re: Google Storage Now Available To Developers

#18
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comparison assumes that the average lifetime of a hard drive is 1 month. I sure hope that's not the case! Also, don't forget bandwidth charges if e.g. some of your s3 access does not come from ec2.

Oh it gets much worse if you assume that you replace your hard drives every 3 years (their warranty period) which would add a $1.94/month depreciation cost. You could add into the cost / GB of bandwidth to access the files, not as easy to factor into a TCO model in the personal use case.

It gets better, not worse. At steady state you just account for the depreciation cost, though, right? So that's $1.94/TB/MO/Drive, or $0.0019/GB/MO/Drive or $0.01/GB/MO for 3-way redundancy.

Re: Google Storage Now Available To Developers

#19
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comparison assumes that the average lifetime of a hard drive is 1 month. I sure hope that's not the case! Also, don't forget bandwidth charges if e.g. some of your s3 access does not come from ec2.

Oh it gets much worse if you assume that you replace your hard drives every 3 years (their warranty period) which would add a $1.94/month depreciation cost. You could add into the cost / GB of bandwidth to access the files, not as easy to factor into a TCO model in the personal use case.

The way I was accounting for it you have to replace the drive in 3 years, you have 3 drives. So you've got a cost of $210 that recurs every three years (purchasing the drives). If you distribute that cost across the 36 months that is a $5.83/month fixed cost (doesn't vary by storage usage because you have to replace the entire drive). Unlike Google which can amortize depreciation on a per-GB basis because they are spreading out the replacements amongst many thousands of drives, as an individual you're on the hook for your own drives regardless.
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