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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?"
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
Depends on the QOS requirements.
They might have to pay out a grand for every 30 seconds you can't get your data or there is too much latency.
To expand on this Salesforce.com has two different blocks of storage allocated for any Salesforce instance. One is data storage which is for tables and you start at 1GB for your database. This is where the quote of $3000 for each additional GB comes from. The other is file storage, where you save PDFs and other record attachments. You start off with 30GB and it is much more in line with normal cloud data storage prices. Your usage of both is displayed seperately on your companies Salesforce admin page.
As the parent said the cost of that 1GB is not really the disk space but the expected transaction cost in terms of servers. The number of bytes shown as used is not even based on any actual disk usage (this would be complicated with table structure, overhead, indexes and fragmentation). For most tables they use a formula of 2KB per record - it doesn't matter if it's an contact record which is probably stuffed with much more then 2KB, or a very simple custom sales record containing a name and a dollar amount. There are a few special tables that are treated at 512 bytes per record, like the table containing chatter updates (Salesforce.com's social media like notifications). Taken all together this means that the "1GB" of data allowance is really 250,000+ records, depending on how much is chatter vs. actual records and not anything related to disk space. It's just easier to explain it as 1GB to a management person rather then as a complex relationship between records, transactions and indexes.
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.
The role of IT is to take care of the monster, not tame it.
What gives you that idea? You assume IT has the same role in every organization? Bad assumption.
it's like having the office administrator go around making sure people use both sides of the pages in notebooks and that people stop doodling on post-its while taking calls because it's waste.
When the office administrator is given a fixed budget for the purchase of post-it paper, the admin might impose a limit on the number of post-its each department has access to.
Or a company where cafeteria people decided that there is no need to stock both milk and cream for coffee?
If management tells the cafeteria people to reduce their food costs, by reducing their budget, the cafeteria/food department may do just that.
IT should be there to offer training and provide guidance but in the end it's a support function, not a business driver. IT is there to support the sales staff, not school them or patronize them.
Nonsense. IT is there to provide infrastructure for data processing, and efficient data processing is a crucial business driver that can provide competitive advantage.
That means the IT department allocating their IT budget in a manner that maximizes organizational efficiency is to be expected; new productivity-enabling improvements to systems protection against security threats, and provisioning of local storage, over purchase of overpriced disk space on remote web site.