StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.
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How to save money and maintain integrity of your data with LTO? By no means. If you save your money on the purchase of some modern physical tape drive for backup purpose, you spend twice as much on maintaining media in your datacenter. It’s going round in circles, agree? But you have the opportunity to get rid of all these inconveniences and access your data anytime and securely store it locally with flexible tiering and replication to Backblaze (B2) Cloud Storage. And save your money! We do not urge you to take our word for it. We invite you to visualize your benefits for the decades ahead with our calculator. LTO Vs B2.Check for yourself what it means to have StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze in your IT infrastructure.
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Holy cow, backups ain't cheap!
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@Dashrender It's way cheaper than LTO.
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@DustinB3403 said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
@Dashrender It's way cheaper than LTO.
Frankly, at 2 TB, I would never consider LTO - well, almost never... that's such a small amount of data, I'd use HDDs or hell - SSDs and swap them around as needed. and the cost savings over B2 would be like ...
5 year cost.
B2 Cloud storage - $33K
SSD daily swaps with dedicated server (with local storage) - $5K -
What we don't know is if there is an offsite storage fee for the LTO tapes in that price...
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@Dashrender They make some assumptions that just don't apply to many businesses. Or at least would never be included in many business decisions.
I know people will say you have to include those costs, or you are not seeing the real price; yes I know that. BUT the fact of the matter is, most companies will not.
For example, if a company is going to ask an EXISTING employee to manage those backups, they are not going to calculate the cost of labor for the backup in their decision, they are going to add that task to the existing workload of that employee and not change the compensation.
I think their calculator is highly flawed for use in the real world of existing customer who already have some sort of backup in place. If their goal was to compare "Perfect" scenarios with "Perfect" business models with "Perfect" cost analysis, then I'll give them credit. Their calculator doesn;t apply in the IT world I have worked in for more than 30 years.
Here's a piece of their "assumptions" page:
Annual personnel cost $104,000 Annual salary + benefits, FTE who manages LTO system(s) - $50/hour
Wage growth 2% Annual wage increase for LTO person
Cost of Storage $0.005 Cost of storage per month per GB (Backblaze)
Download percentage 10% Percentage of data downloaded each year, based on the total amount of data
Cost of Download $0.01 Cost to download 1 GB of data
Network Cost (monthly) $400 Incremental cost to upgrade network speeds (symmetric 500 Mbps minimum)My biggest issues are with Annual personnel cost and Network Cost. I think most companies will make do with what they have and will not experience these assumed costs.
What do you think about their Assumptions page?
It's a java link under the calculator. -
@Dashrender said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
@DustinB3403 said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
@Dashrender It's way cheaper than LTO.
Frankly, at 2 TB, I would never consider LTO - well, almost never... that's such a small amount of data, I'd use HDDs or hell - SSDs and swap them around as needed. and the cost savings over B2 would be like ...
5 year cost.
B2 Cloud storage - $33K
SSD daily swaps with dedicated server (with local storage) - $5KAt 2TB I bet LTO would save you a fortune.
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@JasGot said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
For example, if a company is going to ask an EXISTING employee to manage those backups, they are not going to calculate the cost of labor for the backup in their decision, they are going to add that task to the existing workload of that employee and not change the compensation.
But they lose the value of that employee which, presumably, is higher than his salary. So the impact is higher, not lower.
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@JasGot said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
Annual personnel cost $104,000 Annual salary + benefits, FTE who manages LTO system(s) - $50/hour
LTO systems don't require that kind of management, even in giant organizations. The labour to manage LTO vs non-LTO is about the same. You need all of the same backup management people either way.
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@JasGot said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
My biggest issues are with Annual personnel cost and Network Cost. I think most companies will make do with what they have and will not experience these assumed costs.
Network cost is real, and lots of companies pay for that. Personnel costs are pretty easy to figure out by pricing out a service to do it all for you which would tell you what it would cost in real terms.
What most companies will do doesn't tell us much. It's what it costs them that we need to know.
But LTO management is like.... a couple hours a year average, almost all at install time and normally is handled by the vendor (real cost, just not internal staff cost.) If you are including the cost of offsite tape rotation, then you are talking near minimum wage labour costs, not IT manager cost.
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One problem with the calculator is that it is only for large volumes, those at or above the size of a single LTO8 tape. Dash's example is very small, a fraction of what fits on a single tape. So the LTO costs are way higher than would make sense. For his size, he could use smaller, cheaper tapes.
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For those wondering, an LTO single tape is ~30TB of storage. This media is only meant for companies that need to write 15TB+ of daily changes. If your daily write rate isn't that high, this is the wrong medium for you to price against.
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@scottalanmiller said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
Network cost is real, and lots of companies pay for that.
But how many companies "need" or are "willing" to take on $400/mo in extra bandwidth charges to start backing up to the cloud?
When my company started backing up to B2, we didn't have to upgrade our bandwidth at all. So for us, that $400/mo they added in their assumptions is invalid.
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@JasGot said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
When my company started backing up to B2, we didn't have to upgrade our bandwidth at all. So for us, that $400/mo they added in their assumptions is invalid.
Did you back up 2TB of data?
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@scottalanmiller said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
@Dashrender said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
@DustinB3403 said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
@Dashrender It's way cheaper than LTO.
Frankly, at 2 TB, I would never consider LTO - well, almost never... that's such a small amount of data, I'd use HDDs or hell - SSDs and swap them around as needed. and the cost savings over B2 would be like ...
5 year cost.
B2 Cloud storage - $33K
SSD daily swaps with dedicated server (with local storage) - $5KAt 2TB I bet LTO would save you a fortune.
you think LTO would be cheaper than SSD drives (assuming the need for a full server is still there for local backups)? or vs HDDs?
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@Dashrender said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
you think LTO would be cheaper than SSD drives (assuming the need for a full server is still there for local backups)? or vs HDDs?
LTO is the cheapest media by a long shot. Tape exists because it is so much cheaper than a hard drive.
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@scottalanmiller said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
@Dashrender said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
you think LTO would be cheaper than SSD drives (assuming the need for a full server is still there for local backups)? or vs HDDs?
LTO is the cheapest media by a long shot. Tape exists because it is so much cheaper than a hard drive.
OK I just looked up LTO-6 media
OK that's pretty cheap (damn those prices have fallen!)
now what about the drive?
$2500'ish.... Depending on your rotation, SSDs could easily be cheaper than an LTO setup.
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Quick cost calculator:
HD 6TB: $110
LTO 7 Tape 6T: $60So in raw capacity, the LTO is roughly half the cost of a HD. Not quite half, but nearly. That's a big savings right there. And that's enterprise LTO vs "cheapest consumer item on Amazon" HDD.
Now we have to compare compression. That HD is raw and that's all that you get. You want to compress what is going onto it, you have to buy and deal with that separately. And pretty much no compression meets the hardware compression that LTO does, it's about the best that there is. So realistically, no one talks about raw capacity on LTO because the compression is part of the tape spec and you expect to get 15TB on a drive, compared to actually getting 6TB on the hard drive.
So in real world terms, the LTO is $4/TB compared to $18.33/TB for the HD. Now we are really starting to see savings.
Next up is performance. If capacity isn't your only issue, performance likely is. Filling 6TB will likely take most of a day, if not an entire day. The backup window has to be huge just to write to the drive. And that's only if you write sequentially. If you do anything else, it'll slow down a lot.
LTO 7 speed is 300MB/s (raw) compared to closer to 60MB/s for a standard hard drive (5400 will be much slower, 7200 about this, 10K a little faster.) But an LTO 7 will crush even a 15K hard drive in write performance here.
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@Dashrender said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
$2500'ish.... Depending on your rotation, SSDs could easily be cheaper than an LTO setup.
It's backups, so if you believe in offsite backups, and you have any amount of retention needs (say a month for daily, year for monthly, and five years for annual) you are looking at something like 50 tapes. So 50 tapes at a savings of $50/tape is $2500.
So that's break even for a really minimal backup scheme.
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If your dailies need to be more than 30 days, the savings to tape explodes. And if your backups need to be more than fits on a single hard drive, tape explodes in savings again. Or if you need to back up (or restore) quickly.
If you do like medical or financial transactions, normally you have retention needs that make for a lot more than 50 tapes.
