Decade of Storage: Analysis of Data Costs

Yesterday, I noticed this interesting tidbit from Rackspace calculating the cost of data over the last Decade of Storage. Of course, there a few bumps in the road that made me chuckle. Interestingly, in the last couple of years it plots the cost from $0.40/GB to $0.06/GB. This ties together a whole bunch of things that I have thought about over the last couple of years. First, now is a wonderful time to be a user buying storage for personal audio and video. Second, regular people are going to have to start to learn data management strategies. Finally, this cost isn’t even close to what it is for me in my data center. It is easy for us to celebrate the cheap cost of raw storage while loosing track of the total cost of ownership for data. I will elaborate.