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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?"

19 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. it's not really just storage by Trepidity · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
    1. Re:it's not really just storage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's worth noting that companies waste storage like crazy in Salesforce. Give your sales staff free reign, and you'll easily use that space up on PDF's, gigantic image assets for email designs that change every other day, etc.

      I think the deal is that they're really not in the storage business. If you're using the software the way it's intended you're unlikely to hit your limit, since simple records in a database take up no space.

      If you're making a new PDF quote, storing it in SF's service, then emailing your clients an HTML email that changes every two days, with quote PDF's attached out of SF... you'll end up hitting the ceiling quick.

    2. 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.

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

      It's worth noting that companies waste storage like crazy in Salesforce. Give your sales staff free reign, and you'll easily use that space up on PDF's, gigantic image assets for email designs that change every other day, etc.

      The role of IT is to take care of the monster, not tame it. When IT takes action to bring down storage "waste" (be it in SF or in mailboxes) on its own, 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.

      Did you ever work in a company where facilities people decided that lights should be motion-sensor-activated after 6pm? Or a company where cafeteria people decided that there is no need to stock both milk and cream for coffee? Or a company where architects found out that by shrinking parking stalls just a few inches they could fit a few more cars in the underground parking? If you expect the sales staff to put links in emails instead of files attachments or if you want to impose a quota on mailboxes you have fallen for the same flawed logic as facilities people, cafeteria people and architects. You lost sight of the value chain and you miscalculate what is and what is not true waste.

      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. If IT believes that a business process is suboptimal and should be addressed, there is a chain of command for that; you prepare a nice spreadsheet with itemized expenses and you run that up the chain. If the person in charge determines that the waste is in fact unacceptable, he/she will initiate a change.

      $3000 per year = about $12 per working day. One can probably save more by shopping for a better long-distance calls provider than by making noise about those rascals in sales who make too many PDFs.

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      lucm, indeed.
    4. Re:it's not really just storage by mysidia · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  2. SMS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    $.10 for 142 bytes.

    ~$700 for 1kb

    1. Re:SMS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      I suppose the parent is flagged offtopic because of the wrong unit. It should be ~$700 per MB, not per KB.

      Or in my case, since SMS costs me $0.25 (send or receive) then a megabyte costs ~$1800.

      Sending a gigabyte via SMS would cost me $1.8 million dollars. Plus regulatory fees.

  3. 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!

  4. Have you ever... by pev · · Score: 3, Informative

    ... 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!

  5. Re:Ripoff Prices -- Roll Your Own Solution by jockm · · Score: 5, Informative

    Dropbox only gives 2GB for free and 100GB for 199 a year.

    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...

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    What do you know I wrote a novel
  6. I charge similarly by holophrastic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. 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.

  8. cost != drive cost by smash · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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    I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
  9. What's in that 1Gb? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  10. Lucent PBX voicemail by MpVpRb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:Lucent PBX voicemail by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I remember an electronic typewriter (IBM?) that had built in magnetic storage. It was a late variation of the old Selectrics.

      For $500 they had an option that was described as giving you unlimited storage.

      Sounds worthwhile, no?

      It turned out the standard magnetic storage was a floppy drive with a captive disk.

      The $500 option bought you a new plastic faceplate that gave you access to the drive so you could change the floppy.

  11. Re:Thats got to be wrong... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Nope, I'm also a SF user, and can confirm the $3k/GB rate. This is for data ::DATABASE:: storage, not just random data storage. So think of it as $3K per year for each GB of hosted database. Their rates for that are much cheaper, though still extortionate, and their entire business model seems prefaced on nickel & diming customers for everything from these ludicrous storage rates to very low limits on daily API calls without paying more. Sugar CRM and other competitors are much better options.

  12. Re:Thats got to be wrong... by mysidia · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That has to be TB, even then, shoot, I'll store a couple TB for someone for 3 grand each.

    Will you still be willing to do that, when they inform, they need you to manage backup of the data, and meet a performance SLA at all times (even in case of hardware failure); and that a defined transfer rate has to be achieved, no matter how many requests per second to read and write to/from that dataset, E.g. all I/O requests have to succeed, and the delay must be kept under 50ms, and the storage must be performant even at 20,000 requested IOPS at 64KB requests of any arbitrary access pattern with queue depth of 128?