Economics of Public Cloud

Storage:

For primary storage and

disaster sites
November 2009
Comparison
 Compare total cost of ownership (TCO) of cloud storage versus local
storage
 Capital and Operating expenses, ignoring local site floor/power/cooling costs

 Calculate 3-yr TCO across the following storage use cases

 Primary storage tier
 Local storage array, local tape backup –versus-
 CloudArray™ storage gateway, cloud storage, snapshot-based backup
 Offsite replicated storage tier for disaster recovery
 Local storage array with remote replicated disaster site –versus-
 Local storage array with CloudArray™ cloud-hosted disaster site

 Observe TCO as capacity increases

 Start with 1TB baseline
 Compare across fixed size X TB storage configurations
 Compare across linearly growing 0-X TB storage configurations

TwinStrata.com 2
Baseline: 1TB storage capacity
$250,000.00

$200,000.00

$150,000.00
Capex
$100,000.00
Opex
3yr TCO
$50,000.00

$0.00
Local Cloud In-house Cloud
Storage Storage Disaster Disaster
recovery recovery

Primary storage tier Offsite replicated storage tier

TwinStrata.com 3
3-yr TCO:
Fixed capacity, primary storage
$120,000.00

$100,000.00

$80,000.00

$60,000.00 Local Storage

Cloud storage
$40,000.00

$20,000.00

$0.00
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Capacity in TB
TwinStrata.com 4
3-yr TCO:
Fixed capacity, offsite storage
$400,000.00

$350,000.00

$300,000.00

$250,000.00
In-house Disaster
$200,000.00 recovery
$150,000.00 Cloud Disaster
recovery
$100,000.00

$50,000.00

$0.00
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 15 20 25
Capacity in TB
TwinStrata.com 5
3-yr TCO:
Growing capacity, primary storage
$160,000.00

$140,000.00

$120,000.00

$100,000.00

$80,000.00 Local Storage

Spikes in cost
$60,000.00 are from Cloud storage
additional
storage array
$40,000.00

$20,000.00

$0.00
1 5 10 15 20 25
Capacity inTB
TwinStrata.com 6
3-yr TCO:
Growing capacity, offsite storage
$700,000.00

$600,000.00

$500,000.00

$400,000.00 In-house Disaster

Spikes in cost recovery
$300,000.00 are from
Cloud Disaster
additional
storage array recovery
$200,000.00

$100,000.00

$0.00
1 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70
Capacity inTB
TwinStrata.com 7
Results
 Small capacities (~1TB)
 Cloud storage appears considerably less expensive than local
 Storage arrays do not scale down to a true pay-as-you-go model
 For fixed storage capacities
 Cloud storage less expensive up to about 7TB for primary storage and 20TB for
offsite storage
 Cloud saves significantly on the remote site infrastructure needed for an offsite
copy of data
 Linearly growing storage capacities
 Crossover point advances to 20TB for primary storage and 60TB for offsite
storage
 Cloud benefits from a pay as you go, 100% utilized model, versus a pay up front,
underutilized model.
 All results based on model assumptions and may vary across
configurations

TwinStrata.com 8
 Model Cost Assumptions
Local Storage
Local storage array $30,000.00
Local tape library $3,400.00
Local storage base capex $33,400.00
# of drives per RAID set 5
cost per drive $875.00
capacity per drive (GB) 600
RAID set capacity(TB) 2.40
RAID set cost $4,375.00
RAID opex (annual) $5,000.00 (maintenance and administrative cost)
Backup opex (annual) $5,023.05 (maintenance and administrative cost)
Storage array capacity (TB) 45.60
Local power/cooling/floor space not factored for this study

Cloud Storage Cloud Provider Cost 0-50TB 50-100TB

Cloudarray base license $4,000.00 max cap TB 25 capacity cost per GB/mo $0.15 $0.14
Capacity cost per TB/mo $150.00 $140.00 bandwidth cost per GB/mo $0.10 $0.10
Bandwidth cost per TB/mo $100.00 (assuming 100% update rate/mo)
Additional capacity for snapshots 10.00%
3yr capacity total cost per TB $9,900.00 $9,504.00
Cloud opex base 1,000.00

In-house DR to remote site

In-house DR base capex $107,400.00 (2X storage array, $20K remote lab infrastructure + $25K replication license)
RAID set cost $8,750.00 (2X capacity)
Remote site annual operating costs $24,114.00 (space, power, cooling, multi-site management, network)

TwinStrata.com 9
Additional resources
 Clarity AP used to model baseline configuration
 Free download from www.twinstrata.com
 Download configuration file from Clarity AP portal: cloudROI - local.cyr
 Change parameters to model your exact configuration

TwinStrata.com 10
Thank You

TwinStrata.com 11