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Cloud Provider Cost Considerations

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Overview

  1. Several factors can affect the cost of storing data in Cloud provider storage services.  This guide covers best practices for large data transfers and how to estimate monthly costs.  Some Golden Copy features can incur charges when using Cloud Storage. These should be reviewed to understand potential fees incurred from the use of these features.  All fees and costs of using Golden Copy with Cloud storage is customer responsibility to understand the implications of coping or recalling data from Cloud providers.

Golden Copy Feature and Cost Impacts when using Cloud Storage Providers

  1. Cloud providers charge for api calls, uploads, downloads and tier transitions.  Read the feature list below and how usage of these features can incur charges from your cloud provider.
    1. Archive job - api costs, HTTP put API costs, storage costs per GB
      1. Re-walking a path to audit the file system will incur api costs.  It is possible to disable api checks before copy.
    2. Recall job - api costs for get objects and data costs from egress of 
    3. Re-run Archive job - api costs to check if a file exists in the object store
    4. Data Audit job - api costs , get object egress data charges equal to requested GB to audit
    5. Incremental job - api costs to post objects, storage costs
    6. Life cycle policies in the cloud provider Storage bucket - The cost to transition objects from one tier to another can attract costs per object moved between tiers.
    7. Recall data from archive tiers to active tier can attract recall costs.

Cost Factors To Consider when using Cloud Storage

  1. Ingress data to a Cloud Provider typically does not have bandwidth charges. Ingress data is data copied into the storage provider.
  2. API requests have a fee in most cases and each file equals 1 API call.  Large files over 10MB are copied using a multi part upload for example  a 100MB file is sent in 10 parts and would be 11 api calls.   This can be calculated as follows:  the quantity of your data that is over 10MB  in file size divided by 10 can estimate the number of API calls to factor into the cost estimates.  The Superna AWS calculator will do all these calculations for you to estimate your costs.
  3. Egress network data charges are much higher than ingress data charges,  egress data is any S3 object data downloaded from your Cloud Provider.  Golden Copy recall jobs will incur egress bandwidth charges. The quantity of data in the recall job should be reviewed before initiating a recall job to understand the cost impacts that may be charged our Cloud providers.
  4. Data Storage:  Use the information below to help estimate your long term storage costs.  Sum up the data volume you plan to archive or copy to the Cloud provider, and estimate your data change rate over a month.
    1. NOTE:  A GB of data on Isilon will be a GB of data in a Cloud provider service.  No compression or modification is applied to the data during the copy process. 

Golden Copy Amazon Amazon S3 Calculator

  1. Superna offers an integrated Amazon Amazon S3 calculator that is designed to calculate costs based on how Golden Copy copies data. It requires information about your data and change range rate to summarize the costs for Standard, Glacier and Deep archive tiers in Amazon S3.  This tool takes all the complexity out of figuring out your costs. This integrated tool uses Amazon pricing API and provides accurate estimates to build your archive/backup business case.  NOTE: Estimate only and is not a guaranteed price. The information is provided as is without any warranty or guarantee fo AWS costs.

How to Use the Golden Copy AWS S3 Cost Calculator


  1. The Default tier is S3 Standard tier and is the highest cost tier.
  2. Try each Tier type to see the cost differences. Use the start over button to change the tier.
  3. Glacier tier will lower your storage costs and Glacier Deep Archive will be the the lowest cost tier. Read the note below on impact of using these Tiers.
  4. NOTE: Glacier and Deep Archive tiers require data recall before the data is accessible. Glacier takes hours, deep Archive can be over a day.
  5. NOTE: Global Regions will show pricing in USD.

Cloud Provider On line Object Storage Cost Calculators

  1. Amazon AWS - https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html
  2. Microsoft Azure - Azure pricing calculator 


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