Re-thinking Storage Technology Replacement Policy

We are now at work on the replacement for our two initial economic models, combining the detailed view of the short-term model with the big picture of the long-term model. As I explained in an earlier post, the policy that determines when storage media are replaced by successors has interesting effects on the outcome. Now I have to implement this policy for the new model, and I'm finding that the additional level of detail from the short-term model makes this a lot more complex. Below the fold is a wonkish discussion of these complexities.

Amazon's Announcement of Glacier

Today's announcement from Amazon of Glacier vindicates the point I made here, that the pricing model of cloud storage services such as S3 is unsuitable for long-term storage. In order to have a competitive product in the the long-term storage market Amazon had to develop a new one, with a different pricing model. S3 wasn't competitive. Details are below the fold.