What’s the most you would pay for 1 TB of virtual storage?

Depends on the level of redundancy and management that you want. You can buy a 1TB hard drive for

Amazon S3 is certainly the popular option. It's pretty cheap, and widely supported. Price isn't unreasonable, but you can probably find cheaper options.

Other options include rackspace, or PowerVPS. I can't recall more off the top of my head, but this podcast: http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-cloud-computing has interviewed a lot of great vendors.

I just built an 8TB iSCSI SAN for home and business for a one-time cost of $282/TB. It is immediately expandable up to 16TB, reducing the cost to $191/TB. Of course, this is on-site storage and still requires an off-site backup scheme.

Those prices are very expensive!

Atum would be a good solution for you to look into.... Atum offers packages from $39 unmanaged VPS and $89 managed VPS with 2 TB bandwidth! Some other advantages include tier 4 data centers, RAID 5, dedicated CPUs that aren't shared with any neighbours and much more...

Take a look at these plans at www.atum.com

Thanks :)

Why would you pay EXCESSIVELY for an online service, when you can just buy the disks and do it yourself?

A 1Tb HDD will cost you $100 including shipping. You only pay that once, not per month, and will last you for years. Get two if you want off-site backup, and take one home with you.

Use encryption with strong keys and security won't be an issue either.

I really do not suggest people use online systems for backup of critical data of any description.

Even at $39/mo. for a cheap server as per the poster above me, that still works out at $468/year!!!!!

With 3rd party providers, there are no guarantees your data is secure from deletion or destruction, either.

You bring up good points but I beg to differ. With an unmanaged plan, it's just like owning your own server but without the risk. You don't have to worry and are provided scalability, anti virus, no downtime, IT support, and increased performance. More benefits can be seen here: http://www.atum.com/unmanaged_vps.php

Of course, it really depends on what you are looking for and your needs. If it's just a one person shop, a $100 HDD will work fine. However, if you're a small to medium sized business that can't afford to suffer in performance, downtime and need quality enterprise level IT infrastructure, it's best to oursource.

Robin's points are exactly why I built my SAN-at-home solution. I only trust cloud solutions as long as I own the cloud. I recommend the same for businesses. Unless you know and trust how your data is being handled by the cloud provider, your data could end up on the side of a highway on an unencrypted backup tape or exposed by other poor security procedures.

Besides expandable, multi-terabyte capacity, the price I paid for my SAN also includes a dedicated quad-core CPU, upgradeable gigabit network access and RAID 5 redundancy to protect against the inevitable disk failure. That price should be viewed as an upper bound because I chose higher end components. You could easily knock another $50/TB or more by buying lower grade parts. That would equate to adding as little as $40/TB to the base disk cost that Robin quoted to get cloud-level features.

Robin Goodchild asked ...
Why would you pay EXCESSIVELY for an online service, when you can just buy the disks and do it yourself?

Because any real business understands that it needs at least one copy of the data offsite - and industry dependant, that could be multiple copies, in multiple separate diverse locations as a statutory/legal requirement :)

As to what it should cost - I think thats the wrong point to start the shortlist - as cost will depend on featureset/reliability/network/availability/software/operating-system/backup-methodology/data-change-frequency and so on.

1Tb of Oracle DB is very different to 1Tb of low-res pictures of your cat taken with a phone !

Is this part of an overall backup strategy ?
Do you have multiple sites ?
What format is the data stored in ?
What speed is your internet connection ?
Do you need all 1Tb now or is that a 5 year projection ?
Is the data currently stored locally or centrally ?
Are there any regulations you have to follow regarding export or release of your data ?

Without answers to those and related questions it would be impossible to even guess if an online solution is legal/workable/acceptable ...

As I had orignally stated, local storage does not address the offsite backup issue. I address that using a salvaged Megaraid card and DAT4 tape drive. The tapes are stored offsite and rotated out in a methodical manner. This is done at no additional cost to me, other than my time. It helped that I had previously identified, and only back up, the data which is most vulnerable to loss.

The questions that Rob raises are all valid and really go to the heart of the matter. As in all business ventures, one must first lay out the requirements and identify the opportunities, costs and risks the venture entails. Only then can a rational solution be devised.

Hopefully, though, I hope that one considers the total cost of ownership of any solution. In that process, don't forget to assign potential costs to loss of information and security breaches, which increase in probability when your data leaves your control.

It's not just total cost of ownership potential owners of premise-based storage solutions need to consider, as important as TCO is. It's what might be considered a threshold for pain -- how much premise-based service and support is the business owner/decision-maker capable of performing or obtaining? Frankly, most business owners and decision-makers I know are looking to minimize their infrastructure management challenges, and are looking at cloud-based storage and back-up from that perspective. And for those who don't trust the cloud, they don't have to rely upon it exclusively or even primarily -- it's relatively easy to synchronize cloud- and premise-based back-ups where both are justified by business need.

But all of this begs the original question. What should a terabyte of storage cost, and what should those costs include? Is fully redundant back-up included or an extra cost? For that matter, will EMC's cessation of sales and marketing of its Atmos Online cloud-based storage service have anything to do with the relative costs and security of cloud- and premise-based storage? A surprisingly deep discussion already, given the illusory simplicity of the original question, and getting deeper still -- thanks, Toby!

I would pay $20 per month - the current prices being offered are frigging ridiculous. Just bought some 2 TB externals for $89, at that price, it's a lot more affordable to buy a bunch and store at different locations of redundant secure backup and hook one up to internet if ya need to access them online - can't believe there is a not a reasonable and affordable virtual hard drive service.

David
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