I played around with Amazon’s calculator for their Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service).
All I can say is, “Woah!” S3 is not cost effective for video surveillance storage. If it were possible to store all the video recorded at Envysion’s customer locations centrally in the Amazon S3 service, the monthly charge just for storage is in the ballpark of 30 times the monthly cost of Envysion’s entire data center.
This huge cost is primarily due to surveillance video being constantly being recorded, consuming large amounts of network bandwidth and of course storage. S3 currently charges $0.15 per GB per month and here’s the big hit, $0.10/GB uploaded per month. The price to upload is signficantly discounted compared to reading or viewing the video.
I can see the S3 service being very attractive when one has very small or rapidly changing demands for reading/viewing content.
So when it comes to video surveillance operating at a large scale, it remains a good idea to keep most video stored locally near where it’s captured.
I was trying to be very generous to S3 and used conservative and very rough/order of magnitude estimates. For local storage costs, I used a pair of 1TB Seagate drives with a low cost RAID1 controller. I compared that to uploading 1TB of video per month via S3. S3 was roughly 37 times more expensive. If one assumes a retail broadband (DSL or Cable at $35/month) at the remote site, then S3 is still about 6 times more expensive. I don't believe a dedicated broadband connection is needed for a proper remote video surveillance application. One can usually share the broadband already at the remote location. Now, if one actually includes the bandwidth required at the remote sites to send the video back to S3, then you arrive at stratospheric costs (see my earlier blog on the subject of remote versus local storage).