Storage pricing exercise

Prior to doing this exercise, See the reading and lecture slides linked in this session for definitions of terms.

How large, approximately, is your data? If you are unsure, estimate 100 gb. How much would it cost to keep it in the cloud?

Compare the pricing for Blob, Files and Disk storage for 6 months

Aspects Of Storage:

• Redunancy: Always slect "LRS" as that is almost always sufficient.
• Storage prices are not the same across regions, but the default ("East US") works for this exercise
• Consider only the "Hot" storage of the different tiers ("Premium", "Hot", "Cool", and "Archive")
  • for some high performance applications, Premium is required, but look at the price difference!
• Operations, Transactions and data transfer costs
  • charged per 10K operations
  • really hard to estimate unless you know your workload
  • very low costs, e.g. reading 10K Blobs costs 1/2 of one cent.
  • I would not bother estimating this cost unless you know you will have very high disk operations

Types of Storage to Compare:

• Azure Blob Pricing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/blobs/ select "Hierachcial namespace"

• Azure Files Pricing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/files/

• Managed Disk Pricing : https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/managed-disks/

  • note these are in different sizes and types, select 128gb size if you are estimating 100gb data, Standard SSD
  • when you create a disk in the protal, it defaults to 1 TiB size, which is quite expensive / month

Optional: compare with on-premise storage costs

The MSU HPC offers 1TB storage free to any MSU Researcher with redundant backups and high-speed access, with each additional 1TB for $125/year. Since this is network attached storaage is this comparable to Azure Files or Azure Blob storage?

If you need 2TB storage ( 1 free + 1 paid), what is the approximate Azure cost for 2000gb for 12 months, ignoring all operatinal costs (just storage)? There are a few options for redundancy (global vs local) and other aspects. What is the cheapest combination of options?