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.
