How Much Does Storage Really Cost? Towards a Full Cost Accounting Model for Data Storage

In our everyday lives, we create massive amounts of data. But how much does it really cost to store data? With ever decreasing cost of storage media, a popular misconception is that the cost of storage has become cheaper than ever. However, we argue that the cost of storing data is not equal to the cost of storage media alone – rather, many often ignored factors including human, infrastructure, and environmental costs contribute to the total cost to store data. Unfortunately, very little research has been done to determine the full cost of cloud based storage systems. Most existing studies do not account for indirect factors and determinants of storage cost. To fully determine the true cost of data storage, we need to perform full cost accounting – a well known accounting technique. In this paper, we present a full cost accounting model for cloud storage systems. We include all the hidden and environmental costs as well as regular costs to develop a comprehensive model for storage system costs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on creating a full cost accounting model for cloud based storage systems.