accessing cloud storage

Oracle cloud storage is not the first product that performs basic block storage in the cloud. The name is a little confusing as well. When you think of cloud storage, the first thing that you think of is dropbox, box.com, google docs, or some other file storage service. Oracle Cloud Storage is a different kind of storage. This storage is more like Amazon S3 storage and less like file storage in that it provides the storage foundation for other services like compute, backup, or database. If you are looking for file storage you need to look Document Cloud Storage Services which is more tied to processes and less tied to raw cloud storage.
In this blog we will look at different ways of attaching to block storage in the cloud and look at the different ways of creating and consuming services. To start off with, there are two ways to consume storage in the Oracle Cloud, metered and un-metered. Metered is charged on a per-hourly/monthly basis and you pay for what you consume. If you plan on starting with 1 TB and growing to 120 TB over a 12 month period, you will pay on average for 60 TB over the year. If you consume this same service as an un-metered service you will pay for 120 TB of storage for 12 months since you eventually cross the 1 TB boundary some time over the year. With the metered services you also pay for the data that you pull back across the internet to your computer or data center but not the initial load of data to the Oracle Cloud. This differs from Amazon and other cloud services that charge both for upload and download of data. If you consume the resources in the Oracle Cloud by other cloud services like compute or database in the same data center, there is no charge for reading the data from the cloud storage. For example, if I use a backup software package to copy operating system or database backups to the Oracle Cloud Storage and restore these services into compute servers in the Oracle Cloud, there is no charge for restoring the data to the compute or database servers.

To calculate the cost of cloud storage from Oracle, look at the pricing information on the cloud web page. for metered pricing and for un-metered pricing.

If we do a quick calculation of the pricing for our example previously where we start with 1 TB and grow to 120 TB over a year we can see the price difference between the two solutions but also note how much reading back will eventually cost. This is something that Amazon hides when you purchase their services because you get charged for the upload and the download. for un-metered pricing and for metered pricing.
Looking at this example we see that 120 TB of storage
will cost us $43K per year with un-metered services but $36K per year for
metered services assuming a 20% reading of the data once it is uploaded.
If the read back number doubles, so does the cost and the price jumps to
$50K. If we compare this cost to a $3K-$4K/TB cost of on-site storage, we
are looking at $360K-$480K plus $40K-$50K in annual maintenance. It turns
out it is significantly cheaper to grow storage into the cloud rather than
purchasing a rack of disks and running them in your own data center.

The second way to consume storage cloud services is by using tape in the
cloud rather than spinning disk in the cloud. Spinning disk on average
costs $30/TB/month whereas tape averages $1/TB/month. Tape is not offered
in an un-metered service so you do need to look at how much you read back
because there is a charge of $5/TB to read the data back. This compares to
$7/TB/month with Amazon plus the $5/TB upload and download charges.