The Total Cost of (Non) Ownership of
Storage In The Cloud
Jinesh Varia
jvaria@amazon.com
Technology Evangelist
The AWS Cloud For Enterprises
Tools to access
services
Cross Service
features
High-level
building blocks
Low-level
building blocks
Pay as you go
When Comparing TCO…
When calculating TCO…
#1 Understand the difference between useable vs. raw storage
capacity and know your utilization
Report: File Storage Costs Less In The Cloud Than In-House
It’s Easy To Get An Incomplete And Incorrect
Comparison Of Cloud And Internal Storage
August 2011 “File Storage Costs Less In The Cloud Than In-House”
On-Premises Storage
Allocation
1 PB
Raw Storage
Disk storage volumes in a box
Usable Storage
RAID protection, Formatted Ready
Allocated Storage
Pre-allocation / Capacity Planning
Utilized Storage
Disk storage available to the database,
Operating system
Application Storage
Actual storage used by the application
1,048,576 GB
80%
90%
70%-80%
1,820,133 GB
Source: Dave Merrill’s Blog
On-Premises Storage
Amazon S3
Raw Storage
Disk storage volumes in a box
Usable Storage
RAID protection, Formatted Ready
Allocated Storage
Pre-allocation
Utilized Storage
Disk storage available to the database,
Operating system
Application Storage
Actual storage used by the application
1 PB
When calculating TCO…
#1 Understand the difference between useable vs. raw storage
capacity and know your utilization
#2 Compare the redundancy and durability levels
(Different classes of storage : Reduced Redundancy Store)
Multiple pricing models
Standard Storage vs. Reduced Redundancy Storage
AWS Regions and Availability Zones
99.999999999%
99.99%
When calculating TCO…
#1 Understand the difference between useable vs. raw storage
capacity and know your utilization
#2 Compare the redundancy and durability levels
(Different classes of storage : Reduced Redundancy Store)
#3 Take all the fixed costs into consideration
(Don’t forget people, power, space, ….)
Take all the Fixed Costs in to consideration
Cost Factors
One-time Upfront
AWS
Monthly
Server Hardware
0
On-site
Backup
Archive
$$$
Network Hardware
0
$$
$$
0
0
0
Hardware Maintenance
0
$$
$$
0
0
0
Software OS
0
$$
$$
$
0
0
Power and Cooling and Data
Center Efficiency
0
0
$$
0
0
$
Data Center/co-lo Space
0
$$
$$
0
0
0
Personnel (Administration)
0
$$
$$
$
$$
$$$
Storage and Redundancy
0
$$
$$
$
0
0
Bandwidth
$
$$
$
$$
$
$
Resource Management
Software
0
0
0
$$
$
0
Total
On-site
DR
AWS
$$
On-site
Backup
Archive
0
Onsite
DR
0
$$
Storage Administration Costs
Traditional File Storage Systems Are Expensive
To Buy And Run
August 2011 “File Storage Costs Less In The Cloud Than In-House”
Cloud Storage Is More Straightforward And A Lot
Cheaper Than Traditional Storage
August 2011 “File Storage Costs Less In The Cloud Than In-House”
When calculating TCO…
#1 Understand the difference between useable vs. raw storage
capacity and know your utilization
#2 Compare the redundancy and durability levels
(Different classes of storage : Reduced Redundancy Store)
#3 Take all the fixed costs into consideration
(Don’t forget people, power, space, ….)
#4 Use updated pricing and optimize
(Price cuts, Tiered Pricing, Recurring Savings)
Pay less per unit when you use more
Massive economies of scale and
efficiency improvements allow us to
continually lower prices
Automation
Deployment
19 price cuts in last 5 years
“It makes me look so good in front of my CFO. When he [CFO]
sees the savings in our AWS monthly bill, he thinks that it is me
who is working hard on driving the costs down and increasing
efficiency of the company’s infrastructure. I get all the credit for
all the hard work you guys are putting in.”
CIO of F500 company
Massive economies of scale and efficiency
improvements allow us to continually lower prices.
Price cuts
Cloud Storage Costs of 100 TB
$251,600
$195,100
August 2011 “File Storage Costs Less In The Cloud Than In-House”
Did you know?
AWS Free Usage Tier
Free Services
Data Transfer
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS CloudFormation
AWS IAM
Auto Scaling
Consolidated Billing
No Charge for Inbound
Data Transfer
New Customers
Amazon EC2
(Linux & Windows)
Amazon ELB
Amazon S3
Amazon EBS
For all customers
Amazon SQS/SNS
Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon SES
Amazon SWF
And more…
No Charge for Data
Transfer Between
Services within a region
Expensive Tape Robot Library
TimedStorage-ByteHours = KilowattHour
$0.125 GB/Month
When you turn off your cloud resources,
you actually stop paying for them
Continuous optimization in your
architecture results in
recurring savings
as early as your next month’s bill
Individual developer has the power to
save a ton of money for the company
When calculating TCO…
#1 Understand the difference between useable vs. raw storage
capacity and know your utilization
#2 Compare the redundancy and durability levels
(Different classes of storage : Reduced Redundancy Store)
#3 Take all the fixed costs into consideration
(Don’t forget people, power, space, ….)
#4 Use updated pricing and optimize
(Price cuts, Tiered Pricing, Recurring Savings)
#5 Intangible Costs – Take a closer look at what you get as part
of AWS
AWS delivers a premium security spec at
non-premium prices
Certifications
Physical Security
HW, SW, Network
SOC 1 Type 2
(formerly SAS-70)
Datacenters in
nondescript facilities
Systematic change
management
ISO 27001
Physical access
strictly controlled
Phased updates
deployment
Must pass two-factor
authentication at
least twice for floor
access
Safe storage
decommission
PCI DSS for EC2,
S3, EBS, VPC, RDS,
ELB, IAM
FISMA Moderate
Compliant Controls
HIPAA & ITAR
Compliant
Architecture
Physical access
logged and audited
Automated
monitoring and selfaudit
Advanced network
protection
Reduced Time to Market = More Revenue
Opportunity Cost
When Comparing TCO…
When calculating TCO…
#1 Understand the difference between useable vs. raw storage
capacity and know your utilization
#2 Compare the redundancy and durability levels
(Different classes of storage : Reduced Redundancy Store)
#3 Take all the fixed costs into consideration
(Don’t forget people, power, space, ….)
#4 Use updated pricing and optimize
(Price cuts, Tiered Pricing, Recurring Savings)
#5 Intangible Costs – Take a closer look at what you get as part
of AWS
How customers are
saving money with AWS
AWS Economics Center
TCO Whitepapers
Calculator Tools
Case Studies
Other Resources
AWS Pricing Philosophy
Pay as you go
• No minimum commitments or long-term contracts required
• Capex -> Opex
• Turn off when you don’t need it
Pay less per unit when you use more
• Tiered Pricing and Volume Discounts
Pay even less when you reserve
• Reserved pricing
Pay even less as AWS grows
• Efficiencies, optimizations and economies of scale result in passing the
savings back to you in the form of lower pricing
Custom Pricing
Thank you!
Jinesh Varia
jvaria@amazon.com Twitter:@jinman