# Cloud Storage Building Block Guide

The following table provides an analysis of the storage costs based on the various consumption models offered by cloud service providers.

Note

- All costs are approximate, and are presented for comparison purposes only. For actual cost and minimum stay values, see the cloud service provider's documentation.

- Tier names and terminology vary among cloud service providers.

| Hot / Standard Tier* | Cool / Infrequent Access Tier* | Cold / Archive Tier*
--- | --- | --- | ---
Appropriate for | Primary backups Short-term secondary backups Other data with a very short retention period (less than 30 days) and/or a high access frequency, such as data that you access for Live Sync, data verification, or data insights/indexing | Backup retention copies Active data for disaster recovery or other needs Other data with a longer retention period (more than 30 days) and moderate access frequency Note: This tier is also acceptable for primary copies with a 30-day retention period. | Deep compliance retention data (after the active discovery period) Archive data that is older than 90/180 days Record-keeping data Other data with a very long retention period and low access frequency
Recommendations and other information | None | This tier is appropriate for data sets that have a 30+ day retention period and minimal data read/access expectations for disaster recovery, discovery, individual restore, and so on, if you plan on managing data that is larger than 10 TB. This tier offers storage usage at 50% the storage cost of the Hot / Standard Tier, but you pay an additional $/GB usage fee on each GB read. Most protection and archive users store much more data than they access monthly, and this tier is appropriate for that situation. For example, Microsoft Azure assesses the minimum stay at 30 days, so if you apply only a 7-day backup copy retention rule, the Commvault software deletes those blobs as required, but you are still assessed a minimum 30 day stay/storage usage charge. | This tier has the lowest storage usage fees, but accessing data in it can be expensive and take several hours because the data must be moved to a higher tier. This tier is designed to replace more traditional tape and other cold data storage. Many customers move older Tape Vaulting datasets into this tier. Use this tier for the long-term, last-data copy in your system. Commvault recommends requiring a retention period of at least 3-6 months (90+/180+ days, depending on the cloud service provider) and a very low probability for access. If you deleted the data or moved it to a higher tier before the minimum day period, you might still be charged for the minimum day stay. Accessing and recalling large amounts of data can be expensive (over $10,000). This tier incurs a higher get fee $5/10K requests, plus the access fee. On average, Commvault estimates the cost to be $50/TB*. Many customers have learned this lesson the hard way, when they prematurely froze the backup data into the Cold / Archive Tier, and then triggered large copy/read operations that drove the thaw/recall action and were faced with a high cost for the recall event.
Usage charges | Storage usage cost: Yes, ~$0.02/GB/month Read access cost: No Zone replication cost: Yes, add-on cost to replicate the store | Storage usage cost: Yes, ~$0.01/GB/month Read access cost: Yes, ~$0.01/GB/month Zone replication cost: Yes, add-on cost to replicate the store | Storage usage cost: Yes, ~$0.01/GB/month Read access cost: Yes, access + read API cost = *$50/TB Zone replication cost: None
Object size for write operations | Deduplicated data: 8 MB Non-deduplicated data: 32 MB | Deduplicated data: 8 MB Non-deduplicated data: 32 MB | Deduplicated data: 32 MB Non-deduplicated data: 32 MB
Object size for read operations | Deduplicated data: Up to 1 MB Non-deduplicated data: 32 MB | Deduplicated data: Up to 1 MB Non-deduplicated data: 32 MB | Deduplicated data: Up to 1 MB Non-deduplicated data: 32 MB

Related Topic

Planning Combined / Archive Storage Tiers

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