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Ask Slashdot: Data Storage Highway Robbery?

Posted by timothy on from the airwave-robbery-is-very-common dept.

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?"

4 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. You're not paying for the storage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:You're not paying for the storage by obarel · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yes, I just found out that the Ritz are charging £6.50 for a cup of tea, while at Tesco they sell 80 tea bags for £0.27 (0.3375p each).

      Well I never!

  2. Re:Thats got to be wrong... by nzac · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:it's not really just storage by Michalson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.