Working out costings for online storage?

Question

Our current setup has 2x Cores, 1 at our DataCenter and the other at our headoffice. Each Core has a repository size of around 15-16TB being used and the repositories on each core replicate to each other. This gives us our online and offsite backups. We also have 5 archive jobs that are scheduled called Monday-Friday, with each archiving off between 5-6 servers, generally VMs, which then get copied to 5 tapes, this gives us the offline portion of the backups. Each archive uses around 3.3TBs of disk space. 
 Now the question is, i'd like to investigate adding some online storage to this as well e.g. doing an archive to Amazon S3 or Azure. Is the archive option to online storage the best option, can i replicate incremental/base backups to the online storage instead when they are done? What's the best way to determine pricing, i can see pricing by size but also wants details like number of SENDS and GETS and READs, which i'm confused about how to calculate that?

phuff · Answer

You can archive yes, and although you will get the benefit of cheaper storage you will lose the benefit of retention. Replication gets you retention, Archive does not. Also, so we're clearly you can archive to S3, blob storage, but you can't replicate to S3, cold storage, replication requires a live Quest host and a live Quest repo. If you do what to replicate, each core has it's own retention policy, and each protected node can have their own retention policy, however all the data has to 'get' there first, and then retention kicks in. 
 The best recommendation I can make to you for estimation on your SENDS, GETS, and READS is to calculate you actual metered traffic and add a 15-20% factor to them. 
 It really comes down to what it is you're looking for. Archives are cheaper, as they can be on cold storage. The also do not provide retention policies, or virtual standby if you ever wanted to look into having a DR site. Always pros and cons, all comes down to what you're looking for. For replication, there are vendors that will supply you turnkey cores ready to use with fixed costs rather than an AWS/Azure where you get to configure it and the price can change significantly with bandwidth.