Musings of a West Texas Business Venture

Amazon.com's S3 and EC2 Services

Amazon.com recently announced their latest grid-computingenvironment, EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud). This release comes on the heels of their S3 service, which allows users to programmatically store data on Amazon's servers at a flat rate.

I will cover the EC2 service at a later date, after I have a good chance to review it (we are looking at it to help solve some of our high-computing needs). With the S3 service, files can be as small as 1 byte, or as large as 5 gigabytes, and users pay $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used, and $0.20 per GB of data transferred.

A standard T1 (1.44Mbps) data connection can handle around 1GB / hour at full-throttle, running non-stop. A T1 router + data line can cost around $450 / month (leased). That's about $0.96 per GB per month.

A Western Digital Caviar RE (WD3200SD) 320GB and 7200RPM Serial ATA150 from NewEgg is $104. That works out to be about $0.325 per GB. Hard drives have a life span between 3 years and 7 years, depending on the brand, the temperature, usage, and butterfly's in China.

So, if we max out our capacity, and store 320GB of data, on two drives (so we have a back-up), we spend $208 the first month, without S3, on disk storage space. The next month, we spend none.

If we push out data as fast as our single T1 will allow us, in the first month, we would pay $1.61 per GB (two $104 hard drives and the T1). The next month, $0.96 (hardware is paid for, now we are only paying for the T1). The following month, $0.96 (again, just the T1). Every month following, until one of the hard drives dies. And the most data that we can deliver during the month is around 450GB.

Using this formula, with a single T1 and storage we will never have cheaper access to data than with Amazon's S3 service. Of course, we would be trusting Amazon.com with our data, and if they ever have any latency / down-time, our own services / products / company could be affected.

Only with economies of scale and much faster / cheaper per GB data throughput can our system make sense.

posted by Anthony Presley @ 8:38 PM