The following table provides an analysis of the storage costs based on the various consumption models offered by cloud vendors.
Note
All costs are approximate, and are presented for comparison purposes. Refer to the cloud vendor documentation for actual cost and minimum stay values.
Hot / Standard Tier* |
Cool / Infrequent Access Tier* |
Cold / Archive Tier* |
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Overview |
Data that is expected to be frequently accessed. This is best suited to data copies that have very short retention or will be actively read on a repeated basis.
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Data with longer retention needs and more limited access expectations. We recommend aligning this with +30-day backup and DR copies. This service offers storage usage at 50% the storage cost of the Hot tier, but the user will pay an additional $/GB usage fee on each GB read. Any data set that has more retention and minimal data read/access expectations for DR, discovery, individual restore, etc. is generally better suited to COOL if you plan on managing something more sizable 10TB+. Most protection and archive users store much more data than they access monthly, which makes this a better set of economics for the use-case. For example, Microsoft Azure assesses the minimum stay at 30days, so if you only apply a 7-day copy retention rule, we will delete those blobs as required but the user will still be assessed a minimum 30 day stay/storage usage charge. |
Data with very long retention needs and the lowest frequency of access. This tier offers the cheapest storage usage fees, but the access fee can add up quickly and require several hours of delay as the data is recalled to the Hot/Cool access tier. This was designed to replace more traditional tape, Cold data storage use-cases. We recommend using this for the long-term, last-data copy in your Storage Policy use-cases. It should require a minimum of at least 3 to 6 months ( 90+ / 180+ days, depending on the vendor) of retention and a very low probability for access. If you deleted it or moved it to a higher tier prior to the minimum day period, you may still be charged for the minimum day stay. Accessing and recalling large amounts of data can be expensive $10K+, this incurs a higher GET fee $5/10K requests plus the Access fee. On average we estimate that to be $50/TB*. Many customers have learned this mistake the hard way. When they prematurely froze the backup data into the Cold tier, and then they triggered large copy/read operations that drove the thaw/recall action and were faced with a high cost for the recall event. |
Planning Your Usage Charges |
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Object Size for Write Operations |
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Deduplicated Data |
8 MB |
8 MB |
32 MB |
Non-Deduplicated Data |
32 MB |
32 MB |
32 MB |
Object Size for Read Operations |
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Deduplicated Data |
Up to 1 MB |
Up to 1 MB |
Up to 1 MB |
Non-Deduplicated Data |
32 MB |
32 MB |
32 MB |
Best Fit For |
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Related Topic |
* Tier names and terminology may vary depending on the storage vendor.