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My company has reached that tipping point where what we are spending on EBS storage warrants a serious look at moving our storage to a SAN/NAS in a Co-Lo location connected with AWS Direct Connect.

Pricing Co-Lo and Connectivity in this regard is straightforward, but pricing hardware is very complex at this early evaluation stage.

1TB of storage in AWS EBS costs $1,200 per annum ($0.10 per GB per month).

In the order of 300TB, and assuming 3 year depreciation, is it reasonable to think we can get Co-Lo SAN/NAS for < $3,600 per TB?

We don't need All-Flash. IOPS requirement would be about 2k IOPS IN+OUT.

ewwhite
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Garreth McDaid
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  • I work with a datacenter partner who can either rent you the SAN space monthly and provide Direct Connect to AWS or just house a SAN for you. The rates for storage delivered over 1Gbps iSCSI would be reasonable... And close to your AWS pricing. (contact me!) – ewwhite Apr 06 '17 at 15:44
  • "Close" won't cut it. We'd need to be making significant saving on per TB cost to justify migration. – Garreth McDaid Apr 06 '17 at 16:05
  • Strange response to someone trying to help with a realistic solution. Please contact me for specifics, though. Our raw per-TB SAN pricing is $125/mo., but if you're talking 300TB, pricing options change considerably... It's also possible to rent a dedicated array, which also changes options. – ewwhite Apr 06 '17 at 16:36
  • AWS EBS (which is 5*9s SAN) is $100/mo per TB, without any connectivity costs. – Garreth McDaid Apr 06 '17 at 17:12
  • Compute on AWS and storage elsewhere is obviously going to reduce performance through increased latency, so you might as well move the server. If you're using SSD now you could consider st1 volumes, which are half the price of gp2. AWS calc suggests you're paying $300K/month for 1000 3TB volumes? I don't know any tricks to reduce EBS costs, there's no reservations. Your main choice would be to archive some data, move blobs to S3, that kind of thing. Owning hardware may be economic for you at this point. – Tim Apr 06 '17 at 19:26
  • I can't imagine that such a solution would be cost effective... remembering that with Direct Connect, there's a monthly port fee *and* a per-GB outbound data transfer charge to factor in (in addition to the increased latency). Given the scenario, I'd be looking to see what might be possible with st1 or even sc1, combing multiple volumes to bring up the IOPS. Hard to speculate without a better sense of the workload, but 2K IOPS doesn't seem impossible. – Michael - sqlbot Apr 06 '17 at 22:02
  • Latency isn't a huge issue for us. We're a data processing house. We're not doing anything in real time. Anyway, 10GBPS is available from the co-lo location, which is an AWS DC hub, which should be ample. Not sure where you get the $300k figure. I mentioned in previous comment we were looking at approx. 300TB storage. – Garreth McDaid Apr 07 '17 at 06:45
  • This is a bad question. – ewwhite Apr 10 '17 at 12:55
  • Possible duplicate of [Can you help me with my capacity planning?](https://serverfault.com/questions/384686/can-you-help-me-with-my-capacity-planning) – kasperd Apr 16 '17 at 12:08

2 Answers2

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SAN/NAS for < $3,600 per TB?

This is totally doable. However, don't forget that apart from SAN hardware/software itself, there are lots of things that should be considered, such as: redundant power supplies, redundant WAN/LAN, IT staff onsite who will manage your infrastructure, etc..

First off, define how much downtime costs for you company and determine your RTO/RPO. This is a business question that should be addressed to your bosses. Finally, it would be much easier for you to spec-out a proper hardware/software when you know all the details.

Strepsils
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well it is hard say what the on premise storage costs are in your case, because it is not only the hardware. Also the hardware costs depends on the offer you get. But if there are no high IOPS needed, why you don´t use S3 with riofs? With riofs you can mount a S3 bucket directly on you EC2. https://github.com/skoobe/riofs

In S3 your 300TB will be ~$90.000 p.a. which means ~$300 per TB/p.a (in Frankfurt region)

Maybe thats an alternative for you?

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ThoBe
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