Storage Solutions Head for the On Demand Cloud - Bandwidth considerations
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But there are also some lesser-known considerations, including whether
or not vendors charge based on the number of times data is accessed,
says Rob Walters, general manager of hosted services provider The
Planet’s Storage and Data Protection division.
Walters says cloud storage fills a void for customers who need
affordable storage for archiving, backup and disaster recovery
purposes. Offering storage as a service via a “utility billing
methodology” is a smart move for hosting providers such as The Planet
and solution providers who deliver the services.
He says The Planet uses a fairly typical cloud pricing model,
charging based on capacity used and the amount of bandwidth a customer
needs to access their capacity. But where pricing “surprises” occur
with other providers is when customers make demands to their data, and
are charged for each request.
“At first it seems pretty cheap, because it’s a
‘pay-as-you-go-for-only-what-you-use’ model. But then you realize that
you’re making a lot of requests to call up that stored data – maybe you
even write an application to automate calls to that data – and it
starts to add up,” Walters says. Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, or
S3, charges per request in addition to standard capacity and bandwidth
fees. But that doesn’t mean you should write off vendors based on
different pricing models and fees if their offerings fit your
customers' needs.
Often, it’s less a matter of cost than the types of data customers need to store.
