18 Moving data to the cloud is filled with promise. Simply swipe a credit card, and your business can start developing right away. The inherent elasticity of the public cloud offers businesses access to nearly infinite processing, networking, and storage — the holy grail for early-stage, high-growth businesses looking to drive operational and economic efficiencies. But not so fast… Analysis shows that while cloud delivers on its “cheaper and better” promise early on, margins take a hit as organizations scale and growth slows. At the point when the cost of cloud “takes over,” it can lock up hundreds of billions of market cap, leaving companies in a catch-22: You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it. This phenomenon is referred to as the ‘cloud paradox.’ Across 50 of the top public software companies currently using cloud infrastructure, an estimated $100B of market value is lost due to cloud impact on margins, relative to running the infrastructure themselves. For scaling companies, the magnitude of potential savings from optimization is clear. Strategies to mitigate the cloud paradox vary by company, but repatriating cloud workloads to the data center or moving to a hybrid-cloud model can help organizations lower costs. One company determined to change the game and free their customers from this paradox is MediaHub Australia, the largest broadcast services provider in the southern hemisphere. They’re delivering an alternative to the public cloud with a new storage-as-a-service offering that eliminates its broadcast customers’ single biggest pain point: bill shock. “Cloud providers do a great job of selling storage, but there can be high fees for egress. We wanted to create a new model.” Alan Sweeney, CEO, MediaHub MediaHub delivers an alternative to public cloud for Australian broadcasters Responsible for the live broadcast of more than 400 TV channels and 90 radio stations, MediaHub’s services enable Australian broadcasters to satisfy consumers’ voracious appetite for fresh news without a single glitch. “In the broadcast industry, we deal in large high-density, high-volume, complex files that need to be transferred quickly and efficiently. Our job is to take our broadcasters’ content and deliver it to viewers’ homes 24 hours a day, without a single error.” Alan Sweeney, CEO, MediaHub To stay competitive, broadcasters are constantly vying to be first with breaking news. Delivering it quickly and efficiently requires access to rapidly expanding archives at a moment’s notice. Understanding this need, MediaHub set out to build a solution that would allow its customers to efficiently store and instantly retrieve content — without having to constantly pay the unpredictable ingress, egress and retrieval costs associated with public cloud deep archive vendors. To accomplish their goal, the company teamed up with Scality and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The team deployed Scality RING software on HPE Apollo 4000 servers to power its new storage-as-a-service offering, ArkHub. And the result has been revolutionary. MediaHub’s new low-cost service ArkHub revolutionizes archive storage ArkHub’s modern storage-as-a-service model offers an alternative to out-of-control cloud costs, without sacrificing features. MediaHub’s customers now get durable, flexible storage as well as instant access to their rapidly expanding archives — with no ingress or egress charges, no early deletion or embargo fees, and no costs linked to storage regions — a huge differentiator from public cloud storage providers of deep archive. “We built ArkHub with an emphasis on simplicity to encourage people to use their data, not archive it and then feel forced to forget about it.” Alan Sweeney, CEO, MediaHub The complete self-healing, always-on archive storage solution from Scality boasts multi-exabyte scalability with a 100% availability and 14×9s durability. Because the system maintains concurrent data redundancy across three geographically dispersed sites, access to files remains unaffected regardless of hardware failures, software upgrades or capacity expansions. Now that their huge historical libraries are accessible in real-time, MediaHub’s broadcast customers can create, store, retrieve and broadcast high-quality content to viewers ahead of their competition and at a low, fixed monthly rate per gigabyte. Because the solution is easily expandable by simply adding more industry-standard x64 hardware, MediaHub can increase capacity as required to unlimited linear scale while keeping costs under control and customers delighted. “Data is everything. There is little value in data if you can’t access it. ArkHub enables customers to access their archives whenever they need, at no extra cost, and use this content to their advantage. We see ArkHub as a major contributor to the continued growth of MediaHub.” Mark Strachan, head of product, MediaHub As the cloud paradox becomes a reality for increasing numbers of scaling businesses, they’re looking for ways to optimize infrastructure, avoid lock-in and eliminate high, unpredictable fees. In answer to that call, we’re likely to see more and more companies like MediaHub stepping up with modern public cloud alternatives that offer all the benefits without the exorbitant price tag. Read MediaHub’s complete story here. *Source: Sarah Wang and Martin Casado, Andreessen Horowitz. The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox.
