Calculator Inputs
Example Data Table
Use this sample scenario to understand how each input shapes projected growth, retained storage, and estimated monthly spending.
| Input | Example Value | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Initial Dataset Size | 50 TB | Starting production data already in cloud storage. |
| Daily Ingest Rate | 120 GB/day | New records, logs, backups, and objects added daily. |
| Monthly Ingest Growth | 8% | Expected increase in new data created each month. |
| Retention Period | 18 months | How long data remains stored before expiration. |
| Hot Tier Months | 3 months | Time kept in fast storage before colder archival tiers. |
| Compression Reduction | 30% | Expected stored size reduction after compression. |
| Replication Factor | 2.0 | Number of effective stored copies across infrastructure. |
| Headroom | 20% | Extra capacity buffer for spikes and safer scaling. |
Formula Used
1. Monthly new data
Monthly New Data = Daily Ingest × 30 × (1 + Monthly Growth Rate)Month - 1
2. Retained logical data
Retained Logical Data = Sum of all monthly cohorts still inside the retention window
3. Physical storage multiplier
Physical Multiplier = (1 − Compression Reduction) × Replication Factor × (1 + Backup Overhead) × (1 + Metadata Overhead)
4. Physical stored data
Physical Stored Data = Logical Data × Physical Multiplier
5. Monthly storage cost
Monthly Cost = (Hot Physical × Hot Cost per GB) + (Cold Physical × Cold Cost per GB) + (Retained Logical × Egress Rate × Egress Cost per GB)
6. Recommended capacity
Recommended Capacity = Ending Physical Storage × (1 + Capacity Headroom)
How to Use This Calculator
- Enter your current dataset size in terabytes.
- Add the average daily ingest volume in gigabytes.
- Set monthly ingest growth to reflect product, telemetry, or customer expansion.
- Choose the total projection period for your forecast.
- Define retention and hot-tier duration for lifecycle planning.
- Enter compression, replication, backup, and metadata overhead values.
- Add hot, cold, and egress pricing to estimate operational spending.
- Include capacity headroom for safer provisioning and burst tolerance.
- Press the calculate button to view projected growth, monthly costs, and downloadable reports.
FAQs
1. What does this calculator estimate?
It estimates how cloud-hosted data expands over time, how much remains after retention rules, how much physical space is consumed, and what the likely monthly cost becomes.
2. Why are logical and physical storage different?
Logical storage is the raw retained dataset. Physical storage includes compression effects, replication, backups, and metadata overhead, which change what the infrastructure must actually hold.
3. What is the purpose of hot tier months?
Hot tier months define how long recent data stays in faster, more expensive storage before it shifts into cheaper archival or colder storage classes.
4. Can I use this for logs, analytics, or object storage?
Yes. It works well for log pipelines, analytics platforms, backups, data lakes, document systems, media archives, and software telemetry workloads.
5. How should I choose a compression percentage?
Use historical storage behavior from your platform. Text and structured data often compress well, while encrypted files, media, and already compressed formats usually compress less.
6. Does egress affect the bill significantly?
It can. Teams often focus on storage growth but underestimate transfer charges from APIs, exports, downstream jobs, or regional replication traffic.
7. Why add capacity headroom?
Headroom helps prevent undersizing. It creates a planning buffer for unusual traffic, delayed deletions, migration overlap, seasonal spikes, and reporting variance.
8. Is this calculator suitable for long-term planning?
Yes. It is useful for quarterly and annual forecasting, but you should still revisit assumptions when ingest patterns, retention rules, vendor pricing, or architecture changes.