Taming your Cloud costs with new tech

Making more stuff will cost more to store in the cloud right? Well, not if they're doing their job right.

Cloud providers have a role to play in your environment and that is to remove your need to keep up to date with technology and let them do that.

That’s why something new is important.?Knowing what's happening with the bits that make up the cloud means you can make some choices for the better.

That’s where this new technology comes into play.

In the data storage area, your business is hemorrhaging digital, either from emails or from photo’s and videos from the last 2 years of Zoom or Teams calls, yes some businesses need to keep a copy of all communications.??Or you have improved your digital transformation and now more data needs to be stored.

Keeping data, whether it’s for compliance or for research purposes, data collection is now a big part of your business.?If you look back you’re probably doubling what you stored 2 years ago.

The Cloud business has a plan and it is a master stroke for finance modelling.?See where the use will grow and start supplying the need.?If storage is growing start making a cost model to get as much as you can.

In the cloud, you don’t own the storage gear but you get charged to use someone's storage gear.?The model for the cloud is that they update the kit to the latest and greatest and you just consume it. Like a rental car or an Uber.?Unlike travel where you can model with distance and number of times you need to go those places, data storage, compounds every month.?For example.?Your business meetings in town could mean you have on average 3 trips each week in and out of the city. Your data isn’t a 3 times a week visit.?Your data is an increasing pool of documents, emails, and videos that compounds every day, if not every minute.

When you use the Cloud to store more every day, will it cost you less or more??$$$$

That’s where improvements to technology come into play.?The Cloud suppliers all use someone's tin to store data and that tin is what has improved.

Here’s how. You know how you used to record things on a cassette, then onto a CD and then onto a DVD and now it's on a flash drive. The costs went down as the tech got better right? Well the same thing happened for the tin makers. They're all using Flash storage.

Before you used to have single rooms to store a piece of data, let’s call that a Single Level Cell in Flash storage.

When you store a piece of data it’s in one room just chuck anything you want in there and you know where it is, pull it out quickly when needed. Let’s give it a nick name Single level Cell.?SLC

Now lets split that room into two and now you can throw two pieces of data in there, you will just need to make sure you get the pieces into the right cells.?Let’s call that Multi level cell.?Same size room on the outside but split into 2 on the inside.?MLC Yay we can double what we store now.

What if we split that room into three! Same space on the outside but with three places to store my pieces of data.?Oh it will be slower as you throw data in, as you need to make sure it goes into the right place.?That’s called Triple Level Cell TLC

The current champion of data storage is that same room which has been split into 4 now with 4 areas where I can throw 4 pieces of data, just be aware it will take time to get into the right place. This is called Quad Level Cell. QLC

Now to summarise why this is going to help.

If you were paying to store your stuff in a storage locker you would need more storage lockers to store the extra amounts of stuff that you may have.?In the digital space you can take advantage of the multiple cell internal expansion for data storage.

It would be easy for a cloud provider to provide a larger cost for more data due to more space needed in datacentre racks.?With more data storage you will need extra nodes using more power and cooling.?Enter the improvements in technology, and now it should cost less.?There are less storage nodes needed and less power to consume with less cooling.??

So here is your question for your supplier.?“If you’re keeping up to date with the latest technologies, why aren’t my costs going down?”

Oh and by the way, we expect to see Penta Level Cells out early next year which will be the same room split into 5 for 25% more storage.