It really does depend on what's included in that cost. There are a number of factors that may be included, many of which have already been presented, but I'll list here again anyway.
Raw storage cost of a particular type (NAS, SAN, etc.), which is always higher than consumer grade. You're paying for better performance and higher reliability, usually. Padding for Redundancy within said array Amortized cost of the processing unit Network bandwidth allocation (because the network part of IT charges the storage part of IT for their bandwidth) Amortized salary of the storage administrator(s) Cost to backup, including possibly replication to another site (and hence doubling the raw storage cost), backup software, etc.
The list can go on and on depending on how granular your IT department is with charge backs.
Our raw storage for top tier NAS storage is probably in the $5-10/GB/year, but that doesn't include any other additional costs.
There are several free shell account providers as well. Just search on Shell Unix Free at google and you'll turn up a couple sites with lists of them. I can't say that I've found a decent one yet, but I'm still looking.
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It really does depend on what's included in that cost. There are a number of factors that may be included, many of which have already been presented, but I'll list here again anyway.
Raw storage cost of a particular type (NAS, SAN, etc.), which is always higher than consumer grade. You're paying for better performance and higher reliability, usually.
Padding for Redundancy within said array
Amortized cost of the processing unit
Network bandwidth allocation (because the network part of IT charges the storage part of IT for their bandwidth)
Amortized salary of the storage administrator(s)
Cost to backup, including possibly replication to another site (and hence doubling the raw storage cost), backup software, etc.
The list can go on and on depending on how granular your IT department is with charge backs.
Our raw storage for top tier NAS storage is probably in the $5-10/GB /year, but that doesn't include any other additional costs.
Hope this helps.
There are several free shell account providers as well. Just search on Shell Unix Free at google and you'll turn up a couple sites with lists of them. I can't say that I've found a decent one yet, but I'm still looking.