News

Cisco Claims New Storage Server Beats AWS on Cost

• By David Ramel
• 11/08/2016

Cisco Systems Inc. claims its new UCS S-Series Storage Servers are 56 percent less expensive over a three-year period than the Amazon S3 storage service offered by the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud.

Cisco's Bill Shields made that claim in a blog post in which investigated an AWS cost comparison as part of a discussion about public cloud versus on-premises implementations.

"I was asked the question of how a S3260 managed by a customer in their own data center or colo would compare to Amazon S3 storage," Shields explained in last week's post. "I was completely blown away with what I found.

"The short story is the on-prem solution is 56 percent less expensive over three years with a 13 month breakeven point. If you don't like CapEx, using a Cisco Capital lease, your monthly payments can be less than your payments to Amazon. [I wonder if this is why companies like Dropbox, Moz, and HubSpot are moving away from public cloud?]"

For his research, Shields compared his company's offering with an AWS configuration featuring 420TB of S3 storage with an always-on 10Gbps connection, housed in the AWS US East N. Virginia region, using this AWS pricing. Shields also figured in network and support costs.

The AWS configuration was pitched against a UCS S3260 Storage Server, with tacked on expenses for a software license, warranty and other costs. In Shields' comparison, Amazon S3 costs totaled $551,373.48 over three years, while the Cisco server configuration came in at $243,432.

After explaining the details of his comparison, Shields concluded: "While we are all tempted by instant gratification, it's pretty clear that storing data in the cloud comes at a premium over the long haul. There can be very good reasons for data to live in the cloud. Just as there are very good reason why data should be on-prem. It will depend upon the cost, application, speed of access, privacy, security concerns, etc. The list is a long one and you will need to decide where the best place for your data is."