Dimension Data Canada announced the availability of tiered storage options as part of its public cloud offering.
The Toronto-based cloud solution provider will have three tiers of storage: high-performance, standard and economy. Pricing for each area are as follows:
- High-Performance: $0.44/GB/month
- Standard: $0.22/GB/month
- Economy: $0.07/GB/month
Dimension Data did admit that tiered storage options are currently available from cloud pioneers Amazon Web Services and Rackspace but only in two tier models or based on price/performance.
Dimension Data is claiming that its tiered storage pricing is a approximately 30 cents cheaper per GB a month than Amazon’s block-based storage. When CDN checked Amazon dropped its pricing last November to $0.12 per GB per month. However, Amazon states this price may get cheaper over time if storage needs increase.
Currently Amazon S3 Standard tiered storage price is $0.95 per GB per month.
Meanwhile at Rackspace, it’s offering cloud storage at $0.15 per GB per month or $15 a month flat rate for 100GBs.
Dimension Data’s tiered storage offering is part of the solution provider’s enterprise-class public compute-as-a-service (CaaS) plan. Public cloud clients can now access three tiers of block-based storage at $0.07 to $0.44 per GB per month, enabling businesses to increase efficiencies in the cloud and significantly reduce total storage cost by matching the level of protection, performance and accessibility of data to the storage media that best suits an application, according to the company.
This plan is based EMC’s VNX storage platform. EMC VNX Series is a high-performing unified storage platform that is optimized for virtual applications in the cloud. On VNX tiered storage options can be selected and provisioned through a Web-based user interface or API, enabling organizations to change the type of storage required for cloud servers on the fly. The new service leverages solid state drives (SSD) to accelerate performance for both the High-Performance and Standard options.
Steve Nola, Cloud Solutions Business Unit CEO at Dimension Data said Dimension Data is committed to providing a high-performance cloud that is easy to use and customize. Providing additional options around storage media is an important innovation that enables our clients to leverage the cloud for a variety of applications including high-performance databases, as well as less demanding applications such as archiving, backup and long-term data retention.
Another aspect of Dimension Data’s tiered storage options is that they will be based on the performance, availability and cost requirement for each application:
- Tier 1 – High-Performance: 600 GB 15k Drives (RAID 5);
- Tier 2 – Standard: 2TB 7200RPM (RAID 5); and
- Tier 3 – Economy: 3TB 7200RPM (RAID 5).
Tiered storage is initially available to Dimension Data Managed Cloud Platforms customers in the U.S. state of California, Australia and Europe. The service will be rolled out to other Public CaaS environments in the coming months.