As the product manager for the Isilon 
CloudPools feature, which enables our leading on-prem Isilon file storage solution to scale to the cloud, I often hear about how public cloud is going to rule the world of file archiving. Public cloud promises to deliver unmatched prices with pay as you go economics. But as archives grow to petabyte scale, this promise breaks.
Public clouds excels at on/off workloads, and if you don’t know how much compute and storage you will consume in a year, such as in a startup, it’s arguably a great method to avoid capital expenditure to enable a business model that can fail fast and fail cheap. However, what I see in all verticals with enterprises of any scale is that they often already know how much data they have to store.
90% of their storage is no mystery, with only a limited amount of unknown growth to plan for. If you run an established enterprise, why would you design your archive architecture like a startup?
Of course you wouldn’t.
The one thing to remember is that when you know your consumption, buying is almost always cheaper than renting. This is true for just about all highly-utilized assets; you name it.
Let’s keep it simple and compare the leading cloud provider Amazon AWS’s S3 storage against an on-prem storage solution such as EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS).
Check out the ECS Data Sheet for more information.
What this shows is that at higher utilization rates, ECS, EMC’s third generation object storage platform, may help you achieve up to 65% savings over comparable public cloud object storage. There are additional benefits such as reduction of access latencies, and single vendor simplicity for support, service and contract management; check out the video below which further illustrates Isilon CloudPools and ECS. It all adds up to lower total cost of ownership.
As the #1 scale-out file solution in the world, Isilon’s ability to tier to the cloud, both on-prem and off-prem, give users great flexibilities to grow the size of their archive. However, remember that the more predictable and known your workload, the more it makes sense to save on cost by tiering to a private cloud object archive like EMC ECS.
Try ECS today for free for non-production use by visiting www.emc.com/getecs.