Ask Slashdot: Data Storage Highway Robbery? 168
An anonymous reader writes "I just learned that Salesforce charges $3000 per year for 1GB of extra data storage. That puts it in line with hardware storage costs from about 1993. We've all heard of telcos and ISPs charging ridiculous rates per MB when limits are reached — what's the most ridiculous rate that you've heard?"
Thats got to be wrong... (Score:3)
Re:Thats got to be wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends on the QOS requirements.
They might have to pay out a grand for every 30 seconds you can't get your data or there is too much latency.
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Even so, 3 grand is a LOT for just 1 GB. For that price you can probably have your own CDN, not to mention huge levels of fail over and redundancy.
That price is the upper limit of QOS for storage and I am willing to bet that Amazon does not even have something comparably expensive.
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Yes, someone else should be doing it a lot cheaper for more data.
Still, $3000 is an absolute bargain compared to trying to do this as a one off your self.
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Still, $3000 is an absolute bargain compared to trying to do this as a one off your self.
You've got to be kidding. The last time I looked, 4 Gb USB keys were selling for well under $50. Buy ten and copy your data to them, then hand them out to all of your friends and family (encrypted even). In the event that your hard drive melts down, one email Bcc'd to them all will likely get you at least five copies of your data within a day. Your next door neighbour may just walk his copy over for the price of a free cup of coffee.
Make your passphrase simple but obscure. No way three grand is a reaso
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Still, $3000 is an absolute bargain compared to trying to do this as a one off your self.
You've got to be kidding. The last time I looked, 4 Gb USB keys were selling for well under $50. Buy ten and copy your data to them ...
Now do it again every time there is any update to your data. Let me know when you hit $3,000.
Fine, buy seven external USB drives, use one per day to do a backup, and keep the other six off site rotating daily. Seven * $250 == $1750, a little more than half what they're charging. Oh, and that $250 ea. buys you a lot more than four measly Gb.
If you need to do a backup "every time there is any update to your data", you're either doing it wrong or you need to go to clusters. I was talking about TFS, where he had one Gb of data. So many rich morons out there, and still I'm not rich.
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And sorry but invoking clusters as any sort of solution to data protection just placed you firmly in the "don't know what they're talking about" camp.
No less than ExxonMobil thinks otherwise, so back at ya.
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No application i can think of needs 5 nines which could by why it something like this remains so expensive.
If only say 1000 companies need this service then 3M a year in revenue is pretty terrible when you consider the costs of providing this service, the insurance can't be cheap.
QOS in terms of availability is mostly just marketing hype
Not when compensation is specified in the contract.
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It provides an incentive for the service provider to provide their stated uptime.
I know as the customer they will be working hard to ensure they keep their service up so they make a profit for the year. Also, I know if it goes down some of my losses will be covered.
The alternative is best effort where the only power I would have is to move to another company. If I was to pay them extra I would not be able to ensure they were putting in any extra effort to maximize up-time, without going though the hassle an
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$3000 is not that much to a corporation that needs reliability, employing someone extra and buying the hardware would not even be close.
$3000/Gb/yr. is not that much?!? Why the !@#$ can't I find clients as stupid as this? You could hire all the unemployed burger flipping living-in-their-Mom's-basement geeks in the Universe for that! I know average home users who have terabytes online. What would this scheme cost them?
It's simple arithmetic. I'll wait ...
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This is not for consumer cloud storage, where did get that impression?
This is the kind of storage that you host a database or similar on and hammer it for the whole year, and if it goes down things grind to a halt costing way more than 3k.
Re:Thats got to be wrong... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nope, I'm also a SF user, and can confirm the $3k/GB rate. This is for data ::DATABASE:: storage, not just random data storage. So think of it as $3K per year for each GB of hosted database. Their rates for that are much cheaper, though still extortionate, and their entire business model seems prefaced on nickel & diming customers for everything from these ludicrous storage rates to very low limits on daily API calls without paying more. Sugar CRM and other competitors are much better options.
Re:Thats got to be wrong... (Score:5, Interesting)
That has to be TB, even then, shoot, I'll store a couple TB for someone for 3 grand each.
Will you still be willing to do that, when they inform, they need you to manage backup of the data, and meet a performance SLA at all times (even in case of hardware failure); and that a defined transfer rate has to be achieved, no matter how many requests per second to read and write to/from that dataset, E.g. all I/O requests have to succeed, and the delay must be kept under 50ms, and the storage must be performant even at 20,000 requested IOPS at 64KB requests of any arbitrary access pattern with queue depth of 128?
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well. yes. just buy it from amazon for 0.120 per GB. (transfers are 0.120$ per gb too, first gb of transfers is free)
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whoosh yourself.
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I'll store a couple TB for someone for 3 grand each.
... they need you to manage backup of the data, and meet a performance SLA at all times (even in case of hardware failure); and that a defined transfer rate has to be achieved ...
That's kind of a bit different use case than the OP's, don'tcha think? As in, Lambourghini vs. Yugo? SR-71 Blackbird vs. ... anything?
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Breathtakingly racist.
it's not really just storage (Score:5, Informative)
There's a brief explanation here [architech.ca]. The gist of it is that Salesforce.com's storage charge is charging you for the storage plus the expected transactions/querying that you'll do on the larger amount of data. I suppose they could break out storage charges and transaction/query charges into separate billing items, but they seem to prefer to charge based on just the amount of data, perhaps assuming that overall workloads scale roughly with total data-set size, making it a good billing proxy.
The other reason is that salesforce.com is targeted at The Enterprise, where anything below five digits is noise.
Re:it's not really just storage (Score:5, Informative)
It's worth noting that companies waste storage like crazy in Salesforce. Give your sales staff free reign, and you'll easily use that space up on PDF's, gigantic image assets for email designs that change every other day, etc.
I think the deal is that they're really not in the storage business. If you're using the software the way it's intended you're unlikely to hit your limit, since simple records in a database take up no space.
If you're making a new PDF quote, storing it in SF's service, then emailing your clients an HTML email that changes every two days, with quote PDF's attached out of SF... you'll end up hitting the ceiling quick.
Re:it's not really just storage (Score:5, Interesting)
It's worth noting that companies waste storage like crazy in Salesforce. Give your sales staff free reign, and you'll easily use that space up on PDF's, gigantic image assets for email designs that change every other day, etc.
The role of IT is to take care of the monster, not tame it. When IT takes action to bring down storage "waste" (be it in SF or in mailboxes) on its own, it's like having the office administrator go around making sure people use both sides of the pages in notebooks and that people stop doodling on post-its while taking calls because it's waste.
Did you ever work in a company where facilities people decided that lights should be motion-sensor-activated after 6pm? Or a company where cafeteria people decided that there is no need to stock both milk and cream for coffee? Or a company where architects found out that by shrinking parking stalls just a few inches they could fit a few more cars in the underground parking? If you expect the sales staff to put links in emails instead of files attachments or if you want to impose a quota on mailboxes you have fallen for the same flawed logic as facilities people, cafeteria people and architects. You lost sight of the value chain and you miscalculate what is and what is not true waste.
IT should be there to offer training and provide guidance but in the end it's a support function, not a business driver. IT is there to support the sales staff, not school them or patronize them. If IT believes that a business process is suboptimal and should be addressed, there is a chain of command for that; you prepare a nice spreadsheet with itemized expenses and you run that up the chain. If the person in charge determines that the waste is in fact unacceptable, he/she will initiate a change.
$3000 per year = about $12 per working day. One can probably save more by shopping for a better long-distance calls provider than by making noise about those rascals in sales who make too many PDFs.
Re:it's not really just storage (Score:4, Insightful)
The role of IT is to take care of the monster, not tame it.
What gives you that idea? You assume IT has the same role in every organization? Bad assumption.
it's like having the office administrator go around making sure people use both sides of the pages in notebooks and that people stop doodling on post-its while taking calls because it's waste.
When the office administrator is given a fixed budget for the purchase of post-it paper, the admin might impose a limit on the number of post-its each department has access to.
Or a company where cafeteria people decided that there is no need to stock both milk and cream for coffee?
If management tells the cafeteria people to reduce their food costs, by reducing their budget, the cafeteria/food department may do just that.
IT should be there to offer training and provide guidance but in the end it's a support function, not a business driver. IT is there to support the sales staff, not school them or patronize them.
Nonsense. IT is there to provide infrastructure for data processing, and efficient data processing is a crucial business driver that can provide competitive advantage.
That means the IT department allocating their IT budget in a manner that maximizes organizational efficiency is to be expected; new productivity-enabling improvements to systems protection against security threats, and provisioning of local storage, over purchase of overpriced disk space on remote web site.
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IT should be there to offer training and provide guidance but in the end it's a support function, not a business driver. IT is there to support the sales staff, not school them or patronize them.
Nonsense. IT is there to provide infrastructure for data processing, and efficient data processing is a crucial business driver that can provide competitive advantage.
No it's not, it's merely a prerequisite, which makes IT at most an enabler, not a driver. And in most organization IT is not even an enabler, it's a cost center and in some cases a straightforward liability.
That means the IT department allocating their IT budget in a manner that maximizes organizational efficiency is to be expected; new productivity-enabling improvements to systems protection against security threats, and provisioning of local storage, over purchase of overpriced disk space on remote web site.
So you define productivity-enablement as using local storage instead of a "remote web site"? That's pretty weak, especially since SF and other SaaS/IaaS are in high demand specifically because in many organizations the local staff is not agile enough or is simply too expensive.
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No it's not, it's merely a prerequisite, which makes IT at most an enabler, not a driver. And in most organization IT is not even an enabler, it's a cost center and in some cases a straightforward liability.
Ah, you're an accountant or in Finance, right? Please accept my apologies for wasting any time on you.
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IT should be there to offer training and provide guidance but in the end it's a support function, not a business driver. IT is there to support the sales staff, not school them or patronize them.
What a very 1980s view of IT. We work in partnership with the business to both deliver the expected value from existing services and to identify where additional business value can be gained from process changes. We're service driven rather than sales though, sales is something of a dirty word in my industry at the moment.
If IT believes that a business process is suboptimal and should be addressed, there is a chain of command for that; you prepare a nice spreadsheet with itemized expenses and you run that up the chain. If the person in charge determines that the waste is in fact unacceptable, he/she will initiate a change.
John Kotter would disagree with you, spreadsheets are a poor way to build a sense of urgency.
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To me, that sounds like the same thing, euphemised.
Not really, in one IT sounds like a necessary evil barely tolerated by the noble salespeople and in the other they've part of the business working to the same goal as everyone else.
Treat IT as just a cost centre and you might as well just outsource to the cheapest provider because you're not getting full value from an internal team. The unique selling point of an internal team is quite simply 'we're on your side', and having worked both sides of that line anyone claiming an outsourced provider can say the s
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It's worth noting that companies waste storage like crazy in Salesforce. Give your sales staff free reign, and you'll easily use that space up on PDF's, gigantic image assets for email designs that change every other day, etc.
The role of IT is to take care of the monster, not tame it. When IT takes action to bring down storage "waste" (be it in SF or in mailboxes) on its own, it's like having the office administrator go around making sure people use both sides of the pages in notebooks and that people stop doodling on post-its while taking calls because it's waste.
Did you ever work in a company where facilities people decided that lights should be motion-sensor-activated after 6pm? Or a company where cafeteria people decided that there is no need to stock both milk and cream for coffee? Or a company where architects found out that by shrinking parking stalls just a few inches they could fit a few more cars in the underground parking? If you expect the sales staff to put links in emails instead of files attachments or if you want to impose a quota on mailboxes you have fallen for the same flawed logic as facilities people, cafeteria people and architects. You lost sight of the value chain and you miscalculate what is and what is not true waste.
IT should be there to offer training and provide guidance but in the end it's a support function, not a business driver. IT is there to support the sales staff, not school them or patronize them. If IT believes that a business process is suboptimal and should be addressed, there is a chain of command for that; you prepare a nice spreadsheet with itemized expenses and you run that up the chain. If the person in charge determines that the waste is in fact unacceptable, he/she will initiate a change.
$3000 per year = about $12 per working day. One can probably save more by shopping for a better long-distance calls provider than by making noise about those rascals in sales who make too many PDFs.
Too many words. You shoulda just said "sales staff is too stupid to learn."
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The role of IT is to take care of the monster, not tame it. When IT takes action to bring down storage "waste" (be it in SF or in mailboxes) on its own, it's like having the office administrator go around making sure people use both sides of the pages in notebooks and that people stop doodling on post-its while taking calls because it's waste.
Nah, this depends on how it's done. If you're nagging people, or just looking down your nose at the 'stupid' users, then yeah, you're that guy.
But if you set quotas appropriately, let everyone know up front what resources you're working with, and field any further questions respectfully, you're taming the beast to take care of it. I don't usually have opinions on things like this, where people get really riled up. But I will explain the situation to the people above me, even make a recommendation, but then
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If you're making a new PDF quote, storing it in SF's service, then emailing your clients an HTML email that changes every two days, with quote PDF's attached out of SF... you'll end up hitting the ceiling quick.
In other words, using the CRM as something more than merely an elaborate rolodex (which is why people have CRM software instead of a rolodex in the first place).
Yep. That's Salesforce's model
Have an inordinately busy month? Just SLIGHTLY edge over your quota in some way, shape or form? You've just been upgraded to a different (see MORE EXPENSIVE) tier of service without being able to back down.
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Dropbox uses S3, which does store data redundantly.
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> Dropbox uses S3, which does store data redundantly.
Uh huh. And their SLA requires them to pay you what compensation should they lose your data?
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But, like other have said, the cost of salesforce is not just storage. It is reliable storage, and bandwidth. There has been many times when I have not been able to get to Google reliably. Sometimes even their servers get bogged down. I presume that if this happened with salesforce there
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Try explaining to a non-technical business user what a transaction is, let alone charging for them.
Try explaining to non-technical business users why salesforce.com is charging $3000 for 1GB when a 8GB USB drive costs $10. Guess what, you'll have to explain them what transactions are.
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You know, those ST-225s from Seagate cost a lot of $$$ these days.
Re:it's not really just storage (Score:5, Insightful)
As the parent said the cost of that 1GB is not really the disk space but the expected transaction cost in terms of servers. The number of bytes shown as used is not even based on any actual disk usage (this would be complicated with table structure, overhead, indexes and fragmentation). For most tables they use a formula of 2KB per record - it doesn't matter if it's an contact record which is probably stuffed with much more then 2KB, or a very simple custom sales record containing a name and a dollar amount. There are a few special tables that are treated at 512 bytes per record, like the table containing chatter updates (Salesforce.com's social media like notifications). Taken all together this means that the "1GB" of data allowance is really 250,000+ records, depending on how much is chatter vs. actual records and not anything related to disk space. It's just easier to explain it as 1GB to a management person rather then as a complex relationship between records, transactions and indexes.
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I think this story and all the noise about $/GB shows that a price per record would have been a better solution.
That's not bad, depending on the length of the records/tuples. I think managers who could think beyond tying their shoelaces would've been better.
The summary was wrong, yes. It should've mentioned the QoS they were getting for that $3k/GB, and mentioning database backups would've helped; summary fail. Still, what's a db export/restore really cost? $3k/GB/yr? Hell, no. Not unless there's a crapload of GBs involved and a seriously busy db pulling in a crapload of sales/sec. In which case, they ought to
SMS (Score:5, Interesting)
$.10 for 142 bytes.
~$700 for 1kb
Re:SMS (Score:5, Informative)
I suppose the parent is flagged offtopic because of the wrong unit. It should be ~$700 per MB, not per KB.
Or in my case, since SMS costs me $0.25 (send or receive) then a megabyte costs ~$1800.
Sending a gigabyte via SMS would cost me $1.8 million dollars. Plus regulatory fees.
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Why do people even use SMS anymore? In the age of smartphones it's completely unnecessary. With apps like Kakaotalk, Touch, Whatsapp, and others, it's like bitching that the price of butter churner handles has skyrocketed.
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Because SMS works without internet access, dimwit.
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Why do people even use SMS anymore? In the age of smartphones it's completely unnecessary. With apps like Kakaotalk, Touch, Whatsapp, and others, it's like bitching that the price of butter churner handles has skyrocketed.
Because SMS works without internet access, dimwit.
And because some of us have plans which include a healthy number of free text messages, whereas using any of the apps the OP talks about when you're away from a wifi connection can easily spell "big mobile data charges".
There's also the fact... wait for it... that each of the apps the OP mentions works only if the intended recipient of your message also has that app.
So I guess the first order of business is to send an SMS to your buddy telling him to go download Kaokaotalk... and to hope that he doesn't tex
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Because SMS is universal for anyone with a cell phone. No need to have apps to connect to friends as then you would need App 1 for some friends, App 2 for other friends who don't use App 1, App 3 for other friends who don't use App 1 or 2, and so on.
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Internet mail is universal for anyone with a smartphone
SMS is all but universal for anyone with a dumb or semi-smart (aka feature, aka semi-dumb) phone.
Besides, I don't know if the person on the other end has an email-enabled phone, I don't know if he's got a good data plan or a horrendously expensive one, and I don't know if he's got a teeny-tiny keyboard and no touch-screen that make accessing email extremely painful for him.
Oh, and even if he has a smart phone with free email and a touch-screen, he may not have his email set up to ring whenever I mail him.
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I don't know if he's got a good data plan or a horrendously expensive one
Nor do you know if someone has a good SMS plan or a horrendously expensive one.
I don't know if he's got a teeny-tiny keyboard and no touch-screen that make accessing email extremely painful for him.
Nor do you know if he's got a teeny-tiny keypad and no touch-screen that make replying to SMS extremely painful for him, even with T9.
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Well, for me it doesnt matter. Norwegian carriers do not charge for receiving texts or for receiving calls.
The sender/caller pays for that.
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At least you can read SMS if you don't have a good way to reply.
I use a prepaid crapfone and I have to pay to read SMS, so I don't. If someone wants to reach me, they can call my google voice. They can text it too, but I won't see it until I get home.
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SMS costs 10 cents each to receive (Score:2)
Yep I'll try and remember of the 120 contacts in my phone which have smart phones, which have feature phones and which I don't know what sort of phone they have.
Email works even if you don't have a cell phone. SMS costs 10 cents each to receive if you're on certain U.S. prepaid carriers that are popular among users of less-smart phones. So unless it's urgent, e-mail is cheaper, and I'll see it and reply once I'm at Wi-Fi.
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A number of reasons.
1: It is used often for secondary authentication. If my main smartphone dies and I switch SIM cards, I can still log into banking and transaction sites, even if I'm using the $14 Nokia prepaid special with my existing SIM card stuffed in it. If I'm using an app, then I'm screwed for the most part if my smartphone breaks.
2: It is the lowest common denominator for messaging. If a phone has GSM, it will accept text messages.
3: They have a very high chance of being delivered, even if o
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Those are all very specific special case scenarios. Not standard day to day use of messaging on the phone. Not something that should really be causing people to worry about the cost associated with sending those messages.
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So what? I assume it's part of the basic service fee package? Just ignore them, and get on with your life using an SMS replacement. Or you could spend your days whinging on slashdot about the price of vaccuum tubes.
I get 250-300 messages each month, and I've got like one contact who does not have a smartphone. That's more than sufficient to take care of any texting needs with them, everyone else is texted via an app. If you have excessive amounts of contacts without smart phones tell them to crawl out their
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It should be ~$700 per MB, not per KB.
It looks expensive but a SMS is like a phone call, it can transit across a few telcos and maybe an aggregator or two in between. So that 10 cents is split between many players who have an expensive infrastructure to maintain (including databases where the message is often stored for a long time, and can be read by lots of bored developers or sysadmins).
Still cheaper than a postcard for something faster and with the same level of confidentiality (i.e: none).
You're not paying for the storage (Score:4, Insightful)
You're not paying for the oxide molecules on the platter -- that cost is too trivial to bother with. What you're actually paying for is having the data backed up, the computers to make it available when you need it, and the bandwidth to allow you to upload/download it whenever you want.
dom
Re:You're not paying for the storage (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I just found out that the Ritz are charging £6.50 for a cup of tea, while at Tesco they sell 80 tea bags for £0.27 (0.3375p each).
Well I never!
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Look at the price they charge on Christmas Day...
Have you ever... (Score:4, Informative)
... Looked at the cost of SMS messages comparing price vs bytes?! According to wikipedia, average cost is around $0.11 per 160 char message. So, excluding headers and taking k as 1024, thats $738,197 per gigabyte. Now think about what a roaming message costs... Maybe triple that? Thats got to be a great little earner for the telcos...! Not to mention, sms was designed to take advantage of unused bandwidth space anyway, so its all gravy!
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This is the business model that dominates a large segment of the US economy, and is endemic in telecommunications, software, finance, agribusiness, pharmaceuticals, health care and energy. Companies in these areas using lobbying to suppress competition and write legislation that guarantees high profit margins.
This kind of corrupt system ultimately leads to extreme failure. The worl
Text Messaging (Score:3, Insightful)
At 20c per message (160 bytes), works out at $1310 of income per megabyte of traffic. [wikipedia.org] for the telcos. Talk about a cash cow.
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At 20c per message (160 bytes), works out at $1310 of income per megabyte of traffic. for the telcos. Talk about a cash cow.
Not to mention that both the sender and receiver are usually charged 20c for the message. So $2620/MB is the real limit.
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Not in the rest of the world, Bubba.
Of course, they're all nanny-state heathen commienasts.
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True, but you're paying upkeep for a network running 24x7x365 with coverage in all sorts of weird places to send and receive those messages. It's a bit like taking the minimum price of a post card at the post office and multiplying to get cost/kg. At least here in Norway which is pretty expensive you only pay about 8c/message and you can typically buy much cheaper in bulk and/or various "friends & family" packages to a limited set of numbers. I think the cheapest mega-pack I've seen is 5000 texts for 43
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Aren't there any virtual mobile operators in Norway? They're mostly branded as low-budget here (UK), and popular with students etc.
GiffGaff will give unlimited texts for £5/month, http://giffgaff.com/goodybags/5pound-unlimited-texts [giffgaff.com] They're not even a real virtual operator -- they're a trading name of O2 (a major network), but targeting "budget" customers. I think they reduce costs by having very little customer support. Support is provided in the forum, answering questions earns extra phone credi
/|\ Another DeVry MBA (Score:2)
If a hotel is paid for does that mean they have to let you stay there for free?
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Except no one really charges that unless you have a rubbish contract. I get 5,000 texts a month (plus truly unlimited data and 500mins) for GBP28, plus the phone (HTX One X) was free.
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Even more so because text messages piggy-back using unused space in the status pings that your phone continuously exchanges with the tower anyway, to stay connected to their network.
News flash (Score:2)
The cost of maintaining storage has little to do with the cost of raw hard drive capacity.
I charge similarly (Score:5, Interesting)
even without how the data is being used, it needs to be there, and it needs to be acquired, capacity-planned, and it's a part of a large network. In my case, there's a limit to how much storage I can put into one web server. And since I divide my multiple clients across multiple web servers, if 25% of them suddenly jump 25% in their usage, I hit the ceiling really quickly. And since I have huge administrative and risk costs to migrating projects from one server to another, or procuring a new server, there are real costs as a result.
I'm not charging for data storage. I'm charging for an entire working solution. Data storage has a impact on that solution in a manner far greater than it's simple cost. Hey, motherboards are more expensive than hard drives. But motherboards can be replaced in an hour without loss of client data, or just about any software configuration. Motherboards can be swapped. But when a hard drive needs replacing (it doesn't need to be broken, it can just be too small), it's a big ordeal to manage that data throughout the process.
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Oh, I couldn't agree more. Alas, my clients have specifically asked me to not bill things correctly. They don't want thinks itemized, and they don't want things explained.
Ultimately, they've got good reason. My side is technical, their side is very much not. They need to justify their expenses, which are my actions, up their chain. And because that chain isn't technical, they want me to bundle, summarize, and obscure to the point where every line item references only the initial business-reason for the
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They want it to just fucking work without having to worry about how much air space their monitor has or what to do or who to call if/when things go tits up. That's how I did my service agreements. The client might have known something was up, but by the time they got round to picking up the phone I was already there fixing it. The whole package, "Database &c.,", one price, done.
EDI data transfers cost more (Score:2)
EDI transfer through providers like Covisint costs far more, though I don't have the numbers available right now.
It is all about the bandwidth (Score:2)
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Roughly 10mbps to myself, as opposed to my 756kbps home speeds and no guarantee my IP won't change. Throw me a fiber uplink and i'll internalize all my web services.
I suppose that works for a personal website. For anything meant to earn money -- think about the issue of security: protection against power loss, multiple redundant uplinks, Enterprise level hardware such as RAID, with trained techs on location, spare servers and other parts on hand, to help address hardware problems or other issues an
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Dude, it was only a few weeks ago that we saw very prominent hosting firms along the US east coast, including some major ones in NYC, get absolutely fucked up ... It turns out that they're just as vulnerable as hosting stuff yourself.
You've made quite a logical leap there. Yes there are still large-scale disaster conditions under which a commercial hosting provider may still experience downtime.
That doesn't mean, that such a situation is just likely to happen as hosting yourself. Such high-intens
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That, and uptime.
A reliable enough (two nines aren't enough) electrical supply, a cooled room and bandwidth do not come for free. Add there the cost making your servers redundant, and soon the rent looks like a bargain for everybody that is not a big business.
cost != drive cost (Score:4, Insightful)
You're forgetting: power, a/c, rack space, fault tolerance, network connectivity/bandwidth to/from said storage, backups. None of that is free or even cheap.
Sure, if you want a single 1 gb drive in someone's data center sitting on a shelf by itself in someone's data center with no connectivity you could get it for the drive cost, but that's not what you're paying for.
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Sure, if you want a single 1 gb drive in someone's data center sitting on a shelf by itself in someone's data center with no connectivity you could get it for the drive cost, but that's not what you're paying for.
Oh no, you're going to have to pay an administration fee on top of that, and rightfully so. I'm not taking on the liability of storing your possessions for free.
What's in that 1Gb? (Score:5, Interesting)
First, let me say that the summary is wrong or, at least, people's understanding of what it is saying is wrong. $3000/1GB is NOT file storage; it is for the 'database' storage. File storage is 500mb / license (at least that's how much our org has...we have 25 licenses and 12.5gb of file storage), which is billed separately than 'data'.
They say '1 GB'...but you need to know what goes in that 1 GB. Each record in Salesforce takes up 2kb, period. Our company has the Enterprise level plan for SF, which gives an object up to 500 fields per record; of those 500 fields, (I believe) up to 10 can be 'long text' fields with up to 32k characters (maximum long text is actually capped at 1.3m characters per record). The 500 fields can include dates, strings (255 characters), numbers, picklists and a few other types. Included with this is the option to track history for up to 25 of those 500 fields, which logs who makes what change and when. All of these fields, filled in completely, with all the history, still only take 2kb of your storage. There is one more tier above Enterprise called Unlimited...it allows 800 fields per object, all still in that 2kb per record.
So, yes, if you look at their '1GB for $3000' price without knowing what that 1GB entails, it seems extremely expensive. I honestly do not understand why they market it in that way...they should market it as $3000 for 500k records.
Those that understand how SF is structured will learn to make use of the structure...you *cannot* think in normal relational database way, because even though those 500 fields take up only 2kb of your storage, the other end is also true. If you have an object with 1 field on it, it will also take up that 2kb. We made this mistake with our initial move to SF from our MySql database. We had a structure of Parent / n Child / n Grandchild with 200k Parent objects. All-in-all, the MySql database is quite small (I'd say around 200k parents, 600k Child, 650k Granchild). Translating that structure directly across to Salesforce cost us a lot of money due to needing all that extra storage...our org currently uses 4GB. We are slowly de-normalizing our database to drop our usage down to 1 parent from (at max) 33 records.
Lucent PBX voicemail (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to administer a Lucent PBX
Minutes of voicemail cost thousands of dollars
The storage was already physically present on a hard disk in the box
After paying, they "unlocked" a little more of the disk
Re:Lucent PBX voicemail (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember an electronic typewriter (IBM?) that had built in magnetic storage. It was a late variation of the old Selectrics.
For $500 they had an option that was described as giving you unlimited storage.
Sounds worthwhile, no?
It turned out the standard magnetic storage was a floppy drive with a captive disk.
The $500 option bought you a new plastic faceplate that gave you access to the drive so you could change the floppy.
Bell Canada, mid eighties, $25,000/MB (Score:2)
Back when DTMF dialing was a newly introduced technology, Bell Canada in Ontario, where I was a student, had three different rates for basic service: the incumbent rate for existing pulse dial phones with a dial, a higher rate for new-fangled DTMF phones with a keypad, and a higher rate still for hybrid pulse dial phones with a keypad.
It hadn't been all that long that the consumer could buy their own phone from the local discount mart. If your phone generated DTMF phones, it wouldn't work without paying Be
EDI VAN charges ~$0.50 per KC (1000 characters) (Score:2)
Back when EDI (Electronic data interchange) was new it was often described as each transaction costing "similar to a long distance fax" back in the days when long distance was expensive. Was about $1.50 per transaction.
They measure the data in KC (kilo characters). Typical pricing back when it was popular was $0.50 per KC in early 90's plus many other fees. (could have been more when it first came out)
For a small company you would make a dialup connection to a VAN (Value Added Network) to submit a transa
MACS0647-JD on 16pixels.nasa.gov (Score:2)
Borrowing from the newest story, I'd have to add the 16 pixel image of MACS0647-JD to this discussion.
Linked article? (Score:3)
Back in the day... (Score:2)
Re:Ripoff Prices -- Roll Your Own Solution (Score:5, Informative)
100G on Dropbox is $9.99/mo or $99.00/year. 200G is 199 a year...
But you are paying for backups, file versioning, sharing features, API, reliability etc. I pay for Dropbox because I don't want to admin a box and worry about all of that. For me at least it is worth it. If it isn't for you, then you don't have to use it...
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Give him a break (Score:2)
could care less --> couldn't care less
Cut the guy a break.
He was about to go over his data limit and would have to pay another $3000 for the next 1 GB.
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could care less --> couldn't care less
Cut the guy a break.
Cut the guy a break -> give the guy a break OR cut the guy some slack
j/k
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chances are you don't need an EMC SAN in mommy's basement
all you anon fucks commenting with "but it costs MORE!" should just fuck off and get some perspective on cloud computing pricing. the whole point of san etc setups is that they end up being cheaper. you can buy a lot of storage, transfer and compute time from amazon for the price, all equally backed up and provided from "non-consumer" hw(who the fuck do you think emc sells to?).
but the real gist is that you 3k per year is a lot - even if you count transaction costs etc. for salesforce it's a high profit ite
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All you anon fucks complaining about the cost should STOP and ask yourselves: WHAT IS MY DATA WORTH TO ME?
Is it worth a 1TB external drive stored in a drawer?
Or is it worth being stored securely offsite in a purpose-built structure with redundant *air molecules* on top of redundant everything else, with someone else having the responsibility and TRAINING to make sure it stays that way?
If you're storing company data it might be worth also noting that even in cases of notified breaches in data security you st
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Remember we are still in the pre-industrial era, computer wise ('everything is still manual labour'). That's why IT costs so much compared to the bare-bone costs. That's why we have QA issues.
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I'll vouch. ::limps off in search of lotion::
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Getting rid of IT completely. Salesforce is cheaper and easier. These are marketing droids. If you work for them, you have already lost.
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what about service level guarantees, bundled access, database features, physical security, power redundancy - all the other things that you wouldn't think of right away that would be requisite in providing a five nines uptime? What corners are cut to allow competitors to offer what at first glance appears to be pretty much the same thing but with only a "99" and at 1/3 the cost? Reduced redundancy? Colocating with a kindergarten? Reduced access features?
If I'm sourcing a secure solution for a company, the f