For organizations considering a public-cloud solution, there are a number of underlying technologies that offer use cases to get started. One such area is data protection solutions, which in most situations is based on cloud storage providers such as Amazon S3, Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network, Azure Blob and others. Regardless of the level of interest an organization would have with a cloud solution, one of the first things is a basic cost comparison.
The basic premise of cloud storage is infinite capacity on demand at a periodic cost. For example, Amazon S3 charges $.15 per GB per month, plus some transfers. The natural response is to come up with the cost model for storage provisioned in a private-cloud or traditional storage area network (SAN) on premise. For data protection, this is presumably off-site storage accessible via a WAN or VPN link for traditional “brick and mortar” IT infrastructure.
Cloud storage can be less expensive in a number of situations. The primary favorable cost scenario is comparing a traditional SAN purchase of storage that will sit idle and empty for a long period of time. The cloud storage option instead would cost only as consumed, yet still having effectively infinite scalability. For easy calculations, a protected Terabyte would be $1843.20 per year in the Amazon S3 cloud. Internal storage costs can vary widely, but that same $1843.20 could easily purchase a Terabyte of enterprise or midrange storage. The operating costs (power, cooling, space, support, etc.) can vary widely as well.
Regardless of how the cost argument is defended, one area that may be impacted for cloud-based data protection is the recovery time objective or RTO. The root of this discovery is that traditional storage options, even the venerable tape media category, have fast transfer rates. The hard question is do we put a price on an RTO? Generally speaking, a smaller the RTO leads to a higher cost solution.
The question becomes, if available bandwidth for a cloud-based data protection solution increases the RTO; how does that change the game? Is it even considered? Share your comments on how this topic has been addressed in your organization.
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You can find Rick at http://rickvanover.com and follow him on Twitter at @RickVanover.