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Ask Slashdot: Data Storage Highway Robbery?
An anonymous reader writes "I just learned that Salesforce charges $3000 per year for 1GB of extra data storage. That puts it in line with hardware storage costs from about 1993. We've all heard of telcos and ISPs charging ridiculous rates per MB when limits are reached — what's the most ridiculous rate that you've heard?"
That has to be TB, even then, shoot, I'll store a couple TB for someone for 3 grand each.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
There's a brief explanation here. The gist of it is that Salesforce.com's storage charge is charging you for the storage plus the expected transactions/querying that you'll do on the larger amount of data. I suppose they could break out storage charges and transaction/query charges into separate billing items, but they seem to prefer to charge based on just the amount of data, perhaps assuming that overall workloads scale roughly with total data-set size, making it a good billing proxy.
The other reason is that salesforce.com is targeted at The Enterprise, where anything below five digits is noise.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
$.10 for 142 bytes.
~$700 for 1kb
You're not paying for the oxide molecules on the platter -- that cost is too trivial to bother with. What you're actually paying for is having the data backed up, the computers to make it available when you need it, and the bandwidth to allow you to upload/download it whenever you want.
dom
... Looked at the cost of SMS messages comparing price vs bytes?! According to wikipedia, average cost is around $0.11 per 160 char message. So, excluding headers and taking k as 1024, thats $738,197 per gigabyte. Now think about what a roaming message costs... Maybe triple that? Thats got to be a great little earner for the telcos...! Not to mention, sms was designed to take advantage of unused bandwidth space anyway, so its all gravy!
At 20c per message (160 bytes), works out at $1310 of income per megabyte of traffic. for the telcos. Talk about a cash cow.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
The cost of maintaining storage has little to do with the cost of raw hard drive capacity.
I agree that storage prices are rifdiculous. It's not like storage is that expensive anymore. People are wont to gouge others if they can. Dropbox only gives 2GB for free and 100GB for 199 a year. That's a ridiculous price. I could roll my own solution that's better for about the same AND have no one but me controlling my data. There is always the colo idea. Buy a cheap 1U, pack it full of HDDs and colo that bad boy. Do it at two different locations and use rsync or other tool of choice to maintain your own private.
I can see there being a cloud backlash of sorts coming because of carelessness with important data. I have none of my data in the cloud until I can figure out how to roll my own solution that I alone control. Anyone that doesn't control their data doesn't "own" their data. Someone else does. I could care less what the storage companies say. If you don't control the means of storage, you are at a loss already.
Storage should be cheap, though.
$30k per TB for EMC SAN space.
That is is not a consumer hard disk.....
If you are able to make $10,000 more in sales, then the $3000 is cheap. The price is whatever the market will bear. Didn't you read The Octopus?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
even without how the data is being used, it needs to be there, and it needs to be acquired, capacity-planned, and it's a part of a large network. In my case, there's a limit to how much storage I can put into one web server. And since I divide my multiple clients across multiple web servers, if 25% of them suddenly jump 25% in their usage, I hit the ceiling really quickly. And since I have huge administrative and risk costs to migrating projects from one server to another, or procuring a new server, there are real costs as a result.
I'm not charging for data storage. I'm charging for an entire working solution. Data storage has a impact on that solution in a manner far greater than it's simple cost. Hey, motherboards are more expensive than hard drives. But motherboards can be replaced in an hour without loss of client data, or just about any software configuration. Motherboards can be swapped. But when a hard drive needs replacing (it doesn't need to be broken, it can just be too small), it's a big ordeal to manage that data throughout the process.
EDI transfer through providers like Covisint costs far more, though I don't have the numbers available right now.
"cloud" may be a buzz word of the day, but how can the company put pdfs containing presumably sensitive financial and business data to Salesforce storage? Also payroll data, and employee listings. All these are very sensitive information. Who knows with whom Salesforce may share it?
I am not sure what the mentality behind this is.
I pay about $100 for a server I could build myself for about $500. Why? I need the bandwidth. Roughly 10mbps to myself, as opposed to my 756kbps home speeds and no guarantee my IP won't change. Throw me a fiber uplink and i'll internalize all my web services.
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
Because if I don't hit my SMS+talk "units" ceiling, I pay for them whether I use them or not.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
could care less --> couldn't care less
Cut the guy a break.
He was about to go over his data limit and would have to pay another $3000 for the next 1 GB.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You're forgetting: power, a/c, rack space, fault tolerance, network connectivity/bandwidth to/from said storage, backups. None of that is free or even cheap.
Sure, if you want a single 1 gb drive in someone's data center sitting on a shelf by itself in someone's data center with no connectivity you could get it for the drive cost, but that's not what you're paying for.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Yep I'll try and remember of the 120 contacts in my phone which have smart phones, which have feature phones and which I don't know what sort of phone they have.
Email works even if you don't have a cell phone. SMS costs 10 cents each to receive if you're on certain U.S. prepaid carriers that are popular among users of less-smart phones. So unless it's urgent, e-mail is cheaper, and I'll see it and reply once I'm at Wi-Fi.
First, let me say that the summary is wrong or, at least, people's understanding of what it is saying is wrong. $3000/1GB is NOT file storage; it is for the 'database' storage. File storage is 500mb / license (at least that's how much our org has...we have 25 licenses and 12.5gb of file storage), which is billed separately than 'data'.
They say '1 GB'...but you need to know what goes in that 1 GB. Each record in Salesforce takes up 2kb, period. Our company has the Enterprise level plan for SF, which gives an object up to 500 fields per record; of those 500 fields, (I believe) up to 10 can be 'long text' fields with up to 32k characters (maximum long text is actually capped at 1.3m characters per record). The 500 fields can include dates, strings (255 characters), numbers, picklists and a few other types. Included with this is the option to track history for up to 25 of those 500 fields, which logs who makes what change and when. All of these fields, filled in completely, with all the history, still only take 2kb of your storage. There is one more tier above Enterprise called Unlimited...it allows 800 fields per object, all still in that 2kb per record.
So, yes, if you look at their '1GB for $3000' price without knowing what that 1GB entails, it seems extremely expensive. I honestly do not understand why they market it in that way...they should market it as $3000 for 500k records.
Those that understand how SF is structured will learn to make use of the structure...you *cannot* think in normal relational database way, because even though those 500 fields take up only 2kb of your storage, the other end is also true. If you have an object with 1 field on it, it will also take up that 2kb. We made this mistake with our initial move to SF from our MySql database. We had a structure of Parent / n Child / n Grandchild with 200k Parent objects. All-in-all, the MySql database is quite small (I'd say around 200k parents, 600k Child, 650k Granchild). Translating that structure directly across to Salesforce cost us a lot of money due to needing all that extra storage...our org currently uses 4GB. We are slowly de-normalizing our database to drop our usage down to 1 parent from (at max) 33 records.
chances are you don't need an EMC SAN in mommy's basement
I can see you don't know his mommy. She's very demanding.
I used to administer a Lucent PBX
Minutes of voicemail cost thousands of dollars
The storage was already physically present on a hard disk in the box
After paying, they "unlocked" a little more of the disk
To those confusing this with misc. data: the $3k/GB/Year is for the hosted database, not file storage, which is still overpriced but by not as much compared to competitors as the data costs.
To those saying "Your not paying for the storage, it for the queries/backups/electricity/ etc/" Yes, you are correct, but this still ignores that competitors are much less expensive. Sugar CRM, for example. Or rackspace.com, where a 1GB hosted sql database is just a little over $1k/year.
are you sure!
this one is not about storage, but still a curious number. ibm is charging $2,000 per virtual machine. per month.
You want a drive? Go buy a drive.
Oh wait, you want it online, so now you have to pay for bandwidth. You want it to be failure resilient so now
you have to pay for RAID 5 or RAID 6 and now your per platter costs are higher. OH NO!
Well there we go now. Oh no? Wait/ You want a GUI so you can "manage" your disks from afar on a dynamic
basis. To do so requires 2x the physical disks and a nice slick GUI.
But wait, you want some organization to hook things up for you, put things online, offline, etc. That's going
to cost also.
SO if you want 1TB at a cost of 1TB on a piece of shit 5400RPM ATA drive, there's your lower limit.
If you want 1TB guaranteed, RAIDed, backed up, protected, on faster spindles, it's higher.
FIgher it out.
And quit whining about highway robbery. Nobody is making you buy QUALITY. You're always welcome
to buy the crap you want to compare it to and tell us how you save lots of money... until your data are all gone.
E
it doent include backup, recovery, data transfer, uptime guarantees, quality of service including latency, etc?
also note that 1gb is a HELL of a lot of customer data if were talking about salesforce application data.
Back when DTMF dialing was a newly introduced technology, Bell Canada in Ontario, where I was a student, had three different rates for basic service: the incumbent rate for existing pulse dial phones with a dial, a higher rate for new-fangled DTMF phones with a keypad, and a higher rate still for hybrid pulse dial phones with a keypad.
It hadn't been all that long that the consumer could buy their own phone from the local discount mart. If your phone generated DTMF phones, it wouldn't work without paying Bell more money for the "advanced" service. But you could buy a phone with a small micro-controller where you dialed with a keypad, but it pulse dialed over the line to impersonate the old phone you used to have. Usually there was a small slide switch on the bottom to select the dial mode. Of course, DTMF completed the dialing a little faster than the pulse setting.
Bell had no way of knowing that you had a keypad phone generating pulse dialing on the line, but if you allowed their technician into the house and they caught you with such a phone, they would convert you to the highest basic service rate of all. It was like another $5/month, which for a student, was super annoying.
Bell PHB: this is new fangled so we have to charge more, but it saves us money to deliver the service by allowing us to retire the old and slow and decrepit line cards, so we need to promote moving people to the new technology as fast as our bean counters can waggle their abaci, while also simultaneously incentivizing the change-over with higher fees.
If I made 50 calls per month at 4 bytes per call, it worked out to something like $5 / 0.2 KB or $25,000 / MB.
Russ Roberts has been trying to sell me on the Hayekian virtues of the private sector for about 150 episodes now. But I remember Bell Canada, and I know the private sector will charge you more for the benefit of saving them money at the drop of a pin, if they can get away with it.
Oh, yes, the solution is to deregulate. I got the memo. That's why I'm presently so much in love with my cellphone service, and I bet you are too.
Back when EDI (Electronic data interchange) was new it was often described as each transaction costing "similar to a long distance fax" back in the days when long distance was expensive. Was about $1.50 per transaction.
They measure the data in KC (kilo characters). Typical pricing back when it was popular was $0.50 per KC in early 90's plus many other fees. (could have been more when it first came out)
For a small company you would make a dialup connection to a VAN (Value Added Network) to submit a transaction and check for new transaction responses. Larger companies would have a permanent X25 network connection to the VAN which would have it's own monthly connection fees and data fees but was faster and near instant. There are still legacy users of these EDI VAN networks who have not shifted to the Internet versions of the EDI standards. Hopefully they renegotiated their rates at some point and didn't just let their contract auto-renew all these years.
SMS is easily the most expensive current communication on a per MB basis in common use today and it gets more expensive as providers tend to increase the rates on SMS and not lower them. $0.25 per message domestic, $0.60 per roaming message on Telus.
Borrowing from the newest story, I'd have to add the 16 pixel image of MACS0647-JD to this discussion.
If a hotel is paid for does that mean they have to let you stay there for free?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Am I missing something? I don't see a linked article or documentation anywhere in the post that states these prices.
It's my Sig and you can't have it. Mine! All Mine!
My friend's firm were quoted GBP8K to upgrade their VAX's hard drive from 15Mb to 30Mb (around 1985). I think the raw HD prices back then indicated around GBP500 for the part. Plus they (DEC) kept the old 15Mb drive.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
email storage for old but fully valid email-ids from VSNL India comes very costly.
around half a dollar per MB per Month when google is virtually giving free.
Australian Telco Telstra has the worst international roaming charges I have ever seen.
For example, 200kB for AUD $3, and 4MB for AUD $61 (AUD $1 = USD $1.03 at time of writing)
They have a wonderful example of this here:
http://www.telstra.com.au/mobile-phones/international-roaming/estimate-data-usage-overseas/
For 3 Grand you can build a 4 Gig, quad core, or even 8 core machine with 6 TB RAID and another 6 TB for full back up capability using drives that have multi million MTBF.