Thursday, June 12, 2008

Cost of Storage in Fortune 100

I have this friend who was telling me about the storage constraints (read costs) at his company.  He told me that for 10TB storage they were billed $1.500,000 by their internal IT group.    I call him up now and I cannot stop laughing.

I juxtapose this with a post @ 37 signals about their experience with Amazon's S3 storage offering.  The article is here.  The part that struck me the hardest is as follows:


The fact that S3 is priced so reasonably (our last bill was $2,004.12) and the fact that it’s generally hassle free has enabled us to drastically increase the storage limits for all of our applications....

March 2008:

  • 8.8TB of data stored
  • 1.5TB uploaded
  • 2.9TB downloaded
  • 12M requests

The thing that is so surprising and the thing that really prompted me to post this is these two data-points side by side and then someone commenting at 37signals that 2k/month is a "crap load of money".  At my friends company most mid-level (non-management) staff has approval for that much money and more.  This is a very reasonable charge for this amount of storage and the maintenance and backup of the storage.

I am glad that Amazon S3 exists and I hope at some point, the people selling storage to my friends company sees that the obscene margin they have historically had is just not sustainable.

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