100% Cloud

[mavhc]

4TB drive, £200, let's say raidz2, so 5 of them, £1000, another 5 for backup in old file server, £2000. Rack mounted storage case, 24 drives £500, computer £500, so £3000 let's say

 

Plus 100W * 5 years, say £500.

 

So £3500

 

Vs £0.0147 * 10000 * 5 * 12 = £8,820.00 + internet costs

[Sagima]

Storage is roughly 1p (inc vat) per GB on azure so £1324.80/year for 10TB. Assuming a 10TB raid 10 fileserver I wouldn't say that was way off. But you only pay for what you have stored (and a tiny bit extra for creating/moving stuff so you probably wouldn;t start at 10 - i'd start at 8

[zag]

My initial thoughts are that this is entirely possible if you think outside the box...

 

Email = Office 365 or GAFE

MIS = I believe sims do a hosted version these days

Clients = Bring your own device

Web filtering = ISP ip filter

File storage = OneDrive or Google drive (you don't have to map folders, just upload to the web)

 

This would be pretty easy to setup in a brand new school, but virtually impossible to do in a school where people are already used to certain services. Thats the real key point to this.

Edited July 1, 2016 by zag

[pcstru]

Storage is roughly 1p (inc vat) per GB on azure so £1324.80/year for 10TB. Assuming a 10TB raid 10 fileserver I wouldn't say that was way off. But you only pay for what you have stored (and a tiny bit extra for creating/moving stuff so you probably wouldn;t start at 10 - i'd start at 8

I'm quoted $0.08 Gb/m on basic tier pricing, which is just under $1 per year. Buying in TB pushes down but not by the two orders of magnitude you are quoting. Where am I going wrong?

[Steve21]

Storage is roughly 1p (inc vat) per GB on azure so £1324.80/year for 10TB. Assuming a 10TB raid 10 fileserver I wouldn't say that was way off. But you only pay for what you have stored (and a tiny bit extra for creating/moving stuff so you probably wouldn;t start at 10 - i'd start at 8

 

How'd you get that pricing? I agree 10TB of storage space is about that last time I looked, but that doesn't include a Azure VPN to connect back to your building, any write/read operations. No data retrieval etc. No backups etc. (Unless they changed the pricing a lot?)

 

Or are you talking in the sense of editing it all online without pulling any data locally? e.g. Your own o365

 

Steve

[Steve21]

I'm quoted $0.08 Gb/m on basic tier pricing, which is just under $1 per year. Buying in TB pushes down but not by the two orders of magnitude you are quoting. Where am I going wrong?

 

Guessing you're quoting on "File" and him "block". As it's roughly £0.05 for File GB vs £0.009 for block GB.

 

10TB of file storage = £500 a month Which is what we were quoting on.

 

Steve

Edited July 1, 2016 by Steve21

[Sagima]

I did some rounding in my calculation

I got it off of the Azure website (the pricing on that is probably high as we probably get some sort of discount if we go through a reseller)

 

I may be reading it wrong (there are a surprisingly high number of options) but cheapest for Western Europe it is £0.0092 (ex vat) per GB per month for the first 100TB for Cool LRS (if I actually need hot LRS then it's 1.47p per GB so adjust accordingly).

I think the only way to know for certain is to actually get a quote from our Microsoft reseller but I've not got that far yet - just reading the web pages which makes it seem feasbile at worst and possible cheaper and easier to manage at best.

[Sagima]

How'd you get that pricing? I agree 10TB of storage space is about that last time I looked, but that doesn't include a Azure VPN to connect back to your building, any write/read operations. No data retrieval etc. No backups etc. (Unless they changed the pricing a lot?)

 

Or are you talking in the sense of editing it all online without pulling any data locally? e.g. Your own o365

 

Steve

 

No pulling data locally - that way just seems expensive and unnecessarily complex. In my opnion this either works with nearly 100% cloud or nearly 100% local and the split/transition/hybrid setup is where it gets expensive and complicated

[pcstru]

Guessing you're quoting on "File" and him "block". As it's roughly £0.05 for File GB vs £0.009 for block GB.

10TB of file storage = £500 a month Which is what we were quoting on.

Ah. Surely then we need the cost of the file server which will manage that block storage and there are other costs listed against block "put operations", "other operations", "data retrieval", "data write". Then support costs etc. Or am I missing something else?

[Steve21]

No pulling data locally - that way just seems expensive and unnecessarily complex. In my opnion this either works with nearly 100% cloud or nearly 100% local and the split/transition/hybrid setup is where it gets expensive and complicated

 

Guess what I mean though is how does Jimmy in a classroom access that file data from his machine? As your block files can't be accessed unless through a file server etc. You'd need a file server VM running, VPN etc unless you're offering a web based route to edit the files?

 

Steve

[Steve21]

Ah. Surely then we need the cost of the file server which will manage that block storage and there are other costs listed against block "put operations", "other operations", "data retrieval", "data write". Then support costs etc. Or am I missing something else?

 

Yep that's my understanding too, Was working out £6-700 a month for our quote on 10TB backups to include storage/transcations/VPN etc, so roughly £7k a year over 5 years = £35k.

 

I may be wrong, but that's how I've always understood it and been quoted on. If sagima's way is right makes a huge cost saving

 

Steve

[Sagima]

Ah. Surely then we need the cost of the file server which will manage that block storage and there are other costs listed against block "put operations", "other operations", "data retrieval", "data write". Then support costs etc. Or am I missing something else?

 

It might be me who's missing something. I've asked for a proper 10TB quote so we'll see what I get back (probably an invitation to hire a consultant )

Edited July 1, 2016 by Sagima

[pcstru]

It might be me who's missing something. I've asked for a proper 10TB quote so we'll see what I get back (probably an invitation to hire a consultant )

Heh. M$ designed this to be even more complicated than their volume licensing despite that being almost impossible.

[Sagima]

If it is that (and it probably is if you've had quotes) how much is it to have a virtual fileserver access this in blob form for cheapness?

 

It may be £7k/year but that seems like we must be missing something - how could they expect anyone to actually use it if it was going to be so much more than having my own storage. I might accept a little more for convenience but not 5-6x as much

[mavhc]

Reasons not to use cloud/microsoft licencing: Not a lawyer or an accountant.

 

Even azure file storage, the 5-6p/month/GB thing, is only for VMs running in that data center to access.

 

Blob storage doesn't allow random access either. You need page storage for that, 3-5p/month/GB

 

The "school" I know that's cloudy is a group of mostly 1 to 1 pupils taught in home/libraries, and many small buildings around the county, in their case it's an upgrade to chromebooks from standalone windows computers with no management. They just use GAfE for free, and pay for chromebook management.

[Steve21]

If it is that (and it probably is if you've had quotes) how much is it to have a virtual fileserver access this in blob form for cheapness?

 

That depends on things like spec of machine etc and how you access it. If you're having a normal file server so lets say what 2 Core 4GB RAM 135GB OS disk running 24/7 (assuming you want them to have access as if it was a normal onsite machine), that's another £80 a month. So £960 a year, and then VPN gateway paid per outbound data etc to connect it back to your local network.

 

But assuming your 10TB is a massive file server and you want to do what you could with a local file server, in reality you might want what 8 core 14GB ram? Assuming you're running some dedup etc on it, that's then £327 a month.

 

Hard to compare really, but certainly expensive for what you get really, bearing in mind that's given you no benefits to the on-site one currently, thats just the same as you'd have but over a slower conenction

[Steve21]

The "school" I know that's cloudy is a group of mostly 1 to 1 pupils taught in home/libraries, and many small buildings around the county, in their case it's an upgrade to chromebooks from standalone windows computers with no management. They just use GAfE for free, and pay for chromebook management.

 

To me that's the nail on the head. It's not "moving" servers to cloud, it's replacing services that will make the difference

 

Steve

[mavhc]

The internet has already moved past Co-Lo your server, VM your server, Container your App, and Platform as a Service, to Function as a Service, don't have any servers at all, not even virtual.

 

Cloud is just paying someone else for a server/service, that's only way going to be cheaper the way taxies are cheaper than owning a car, if you hardly ever use your car.

[pcstru]

Cloud is just paying someone else for a server/service, that's only way going to be cheaper the way taxies are cheaper than owning a car, if you hardly ever use your car.

Maybe. I haven't seen anyone list backup costs as part of storage costs, nor the time spent every 3-5 years (or however often) planning, replacing and migrating or investments we need to make to get up to speed with our latest shiny SAN. So perhaps we don't have a full appreciation of our current costs.

 

That said, I think the driver in the next few years will be service, flexibility and features - not particularly cost savings.

[zag]

Why would you want to backup something in the cloud, that presumably is already backed up by Microsoft.

 

We've never backed up our email service since it moved to office 365.

 

Am I mad?

[pcstru]

Why would you want to backup something in the cloud, that presumably is already backed up by Microsoft.

We've never backed up our email service since it moved to office 365.

Am I mad?

What I meant was no one has listed those costs in relation to their locally hosted storage.

[mavhc]

I assumed you had an old file server you can use for backup, put some 8TB drives in or something.

 

Do people really replace their storage hosting that often? I just put new drives in, new motherboard maybe.

[Sagima]

Our backup servers are on the same 5 year replacement cycle as everything else.

If we went cloudy for filestorage the "plan" was to maintain a replica with azure storage on another fileserver (using that server 2016 dfs-r replacement) and keep 1 dpm for backing that up. Currently we have 2 fileservers and 2 backup servers so halving that doesn;t grant me £7k a year spare for azure storage if that's what it costs.

[mavhc]

I always like to split out "backup" into what it actually might be:

Archive (Tape/Amazon Glacier), disaster recovery (off site mirroring), Restoring ancient files (Tape/Glacier/Slow disks/Blurays), restoring recent files (Faster disks/CoW), and avoiding single hardware failure (RAID)

 

As recent files can just use snapshots I think of backup as slower, so don't need latest hardware, upgrade motherboard/cpu if needed, new drives obviously, cheaper than more drive ports/cases.

[pcstru]

I assumed you had an old file server you can use for backup, put some 8TB drives in or something.

 

Do people really replace their storage hosting that often? I just put new drives in, new motherboard maybe.

 

I guess it depends what you have. Our main SAN is a dual node, active/active OpenE software on mostly Dell hardware (we have a couple of SATAboy arrays) - all in all about 50TB of raw storage. I guess we could change components on that but after 5 years I would expect benefits from all areas of hardware so replacement is likely to be competitive in terms of performance benefits. Our file server storage is a single node but we also have a hot standby which copies overnight (because restoring that ~30TB from backup to a replacement device will take a while). Overall, our backup is D2D2T or D2T with an emphasis on having multiple generations of files going back a year and yearly snapshot archives going back several years. All of which is expensive and demanding of staff time and skills. I'm not saying it is more expensive than Azure - but I don't see it costed in along with server, licensing and electric costs and it may be a fairly significant omission.