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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.
100G on Dropbox is $9.99/mo or $99.00/year. 200G is 199 a year...
But you are paying for backups, file versioning, sharing features, API, reliability etc. I pay for Dropbox because I don't want to admin a box and worry about all of that. For me at least it is worth it. If it isn't for you, then you don't have to use it...
What do you know I wrote a novel
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.
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.
OK, and how much is the company paying to employ you to roll your own solution?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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.
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
Dude, it was only a few weeks ago that we saw very prominent hosting firms along the US east coast, including some major ones in NYC, get absolutely fucked up ... It turns out that they're just as vulnerable as hosting stuff yourself.
You've made quite a logical leap there. Yes there are still large-scale disaster conditions under which a commercial hosting provider may still experience downtime.
That doesn't mean, that such a situation is just likely to happen as hosting yourself. Such high-intensity disasters are extremely rare in most areas. And you can also choose what datacenter you locate your hosting at -- east coast is not necessarily optimal; further inland, outside of Earthquake, Tornado, Volcano territory may be a safer bet.
Backup generators might have a chance of failing if the fuel is made available by a disaster; or flooding occurs, and the facility was not equipped appropriately. At a well-run commercial datacenter, these incidents are few and far between, or never occur.
You might also note that in case of a massive earthquake, volcano, tsnuami, or other massive disaster, commercial datacenters may be impacted as well.
Residential power outages, blackouts, brownouts are much more common; most residences get them a few times a year, in some cases there may be temporary multi-hour outages scheduled by the electric company to perform line maintenance. Damage or outage to unprotected circuits (single fiber path) is more common.
Having backup power system is expected to save 7 to 8 hours of average downtime per year; with a potential of saving much more downtime, in case of common weather events, solar flares, or blackouts caused by other reasons.
Having backup network links is expected to save a few hours a year in minor failure network downtime, and potentially 18 to 24 hours of network downtime every few years, based on the expectation of catastrophic underground damage to a pull of fiber.
If the amount of revenue and customer loss estimated by approximately that number of downtime hours per year exceeds the cost of commercial hosting, then there is no case for avoiding professional hosting.
Getting rid of IT completely. Salesforce is cheaper and easier. These are marketing droids. If you work for them, you have already lost.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Am I missing something? I don't see a linked article or documentation anywhere in the post that states these prices.
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