AWS Glacier's dazzling price benefits melt next to the cost of tape

The author's analysis omitted power, staffing, and floor space costs for the tape calculations. Downloading the whitepaper from the Quantum web site, I see "With data center construction costs running as high as $2,000 to $3,000 per square foot", and the i6000 requires about 15 sq. ft. so that's a $30,000 up front which wasn't included in the estimate. Granted, that's only 5% more to the estimated tape costs, but it isn't the only real estate cost. I see estimates of about $2,000 per square foot for operations cost, so there's another $150,000.

It omitted any discussion of off-site backups. How much will that cost?

It ignores growth rate. Do you get the 5TB hardware solution now, when most of it isn't needed, or expand when needed? While with Glacier you just add data and don't worry about it. Assume you start with 1TB now, and grow by 0.8TB per year, to end with 5TB at the end of 5 years. That's almost a 2x reduction in price over the author's estimate.

But hey, that's all in the Amazon Glacier's front page: "Companies typically over-pay for data archiving. First, they're forced to make an expensive upfront payment for their archiving solution (which does not include the ongoing cost for operational expenses such as power, facilities, staffing, and maintenance). Second, since companies have to guess what their capacity requirements will be, they understandably over-provision to make sure they have enough capacity for data redundancy and unexpected growth. This set of circumstances results in under-utilized capacity and wasted money. With Amazon Glacier, you pay only for what you use."

To me, this is comparing apples and oranges. A lot of indirect costs are built into Glacier. With a local tape system you need to factor in: backup software, backup server, operators, power, off site pickups, fire suppression, cooling, security, etc. Sure it might be cheaper in the long run, but it's a lot more to manage.

This is dumb, because he's taking the price per gigabyte for some low tier where Glacier's pricing is tiered. In fact, for an amount of storage as large as his thought experiment assumes, Amazon asks the user to "contact us" for pricing information.