The Hidden Fees Behind Hyperscale Storage and How to Escape Them

The Problem

The problem customers are having with the Hyperscale Storage solution is the pricing and data tiering models.  Pricing is unpredictable and costs get out of control because of Data egress fees (moving data out of the cloud), API requests (reading or writing data), and Retrieval penalties (pulling data from cold tiers).  All of this creates a state of vendor lock-in. 

The Solution

An alternative S3-compatible object storage provider.  The 3 key benefits a customer realizes when moving to an alternative S3 solution are: Cost Reduction/Control, Enables Multi-Cloud Strategies, and provides Operational Simplicity.  Added benefits are that this solution helps enable AI development and deployment as well as helps improve certain compliance postures. 

Cost Reductions/Control 

• Zero Egress Fees (Data Freedom): This is the biggest differentiator. The alternative provider waives the fee for transferring data out of their cloud. This eliminates “vendor lock-in” and gives the customer the freedom to move their data without incurring massive costs. 

• • Predictable, Flat-Rate Billing: Pricing is simplified.  This eliminates the variable and surprising charges associated with API requests (GET, PUT) and other types of data movement. 

• • Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): The cost of storing, managing, accessing, and moving data is much less 

Enables Multi-Cloud Strategies 

• Cloud Agnostic: By storing data with a zero-egress fee provider, the customer can operate different functions on different Hyperscalers, all accessing the same data without paying transfer fees between platforms. 

• • S3-API Compatibility: The use of the standard S3 API ensures that existing applications, backup tools, and data pipelines require little to no code change.  Easy to manage, easy to migrate. 

Operational Simplicity 

• Simplified Data Tiers: Alternative providers offer a single, high-performance “hot” tier. This eliminates the complexity of managing multiple storage Tiers and eliminates high retrieval costs and delays when data needs to be accessed quickly. 

• Focus on Core Service: Alternative providers offer easily managed Object Lock (Immutability) for ransomware protection. 

• Helps Enable AI: Switching to an alternative solution can enable and accelerate AI projects by eliminating the high costs of accessing and moving data.  It also decouples storage from compute, truly allowing for a multi-cloud strategy (which is typically needed in AI development and deployment). 

• Helps Improve Compliance; The service comes with A feature known as Object Lock helps with data integrity, retention, and resilience. It enforces data immutability by preventing an object from being deleted or modified for a fixed retention period or until a legal hold is removed; this mechanism is essential for regulatory compliance (WORM) and protection against ransomware.  

Use Cases: 

• Backup and Archiving: Can be used as the primary destination for enterprise backups, disaster recovery snapshots, and long-term archival data due to its low cost per gigabyte and near-infinite scalability. 

• Data Lakes and Analytics: Can serve as the foundation for modern data lakes, providing a massive, centralized repository for raw data (logs, streams, IoT data) that is then processed by analytics tools. 

• Web and Mobile Content: Storing all the static content for websites and mobile applications, such as images, videos, audio files, and documents. It’s often used to host static websites. 

• Cloud-Native Applications: Serving as the durable, scalable persistence layer for applications built on microservices and containers, decoupling the application code from the stored data. 

• Media and Entertainment: Storing large media files, including raw footage, finished videos, and rendering output, where petabyte-scale capacity is required.