Think Cloud Is Cheap? Think Again!

One of the things that we hear often is that cloud storage is cheap.  Many times it’s heard and repeated so often that it is believed as factual.  The real costs of cloud storage versus on-premises storage need to be put into perspective so we asked Marc Staimer, an independent analyst in the storage industry, to do just that.  Marc identified the detailed information that needed to be evaluated from both Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a leading cloud provider and from Nexsan, the Unity^TM Hyper-Unified Storage System an on-prem storage solution.

Marc laid out the baseline assumptions over a 5 year time period, starting with 480TB of capacity to start and with a growth rate of approximately 15% per year to a total of 960TB at the end of the 5 years.  All details for costs were considered for both the cloud storage on AWS and for on-prem with Unity.  Although Nexsan Unity includes Enterprise File Sync & Share (EFSS) at no additional cost to customers, that was not considered in the initial comparison.  The numbers were staggering!  AWS S3 costs $1,451,799 for the 5 years while the Unity4400 was $379,170 and the Unity6900 was $414,382.  That means that AWS costs 350% to 383% more than Unity as an on-premise solution.

On-prem storage systems such as Nexsan Unity do offer more functionality and data control for a much lower total cost of ownership than public cloud storage such as AWS S3.

To read the detailed study from Marc Staimer of Dragon Slayer Consulting, click here.