Adding cloud storage to the economic model

The next stage in building the economic model of long-term storage is to add the ability to model cloud storage, and to use it to investigate the circumstances under which it is cheaper than local storage. The obvious first step is to collect historical data on cloud storage, to compare how rapidly it is decreasing against the Kryder's Law decrease in disk cost. The somewhat surprising results from looking at Amazon S3's price history are below the fold. I'd be grateful if anyone could save me the trouble of getting equivalent price histories for other cloud storage providers.

CNI Talk on the Economic Model

I gave a talk at the Fall CNI meeting on the work I've been doing on economic models of long-term storage. CNI recorded the talk and I'm expecting them to post the video and the slides. Much of the talk expanded on the talk I gave at the Library of Congress Storage Workshop. The new part was that I managed to remove the assumption that storage prices could never go up, so I was able to model the effect of spikes in storage costs, such as those caused by the floods in Thailand.. Below the fold is the graph.