[laurencerowe]

S3 storage is pretty cheap, it's the data egress that really costs.

For academic centers though there is often an incentive to move things in house due to different treatment for capital expenditures and the opportunity to externalize some of your costs from your grant onto central services.

[epistasis]

Data transfer is less than a single year of Glacier storage, so while it's pricy I wouldn't egress a major portion of the cost.

Keeping this data for less than 5-10 years is pretty questionable, since it's so expensive to generate. Eventually it may be cheaper to store the DNA and resequence when if it needs to be looked at again. However, if you're doing petabytes of storage, it's going to me much more economical to have your own storage and compute than to use AWS. Particularly at the rate that academic centers pay for sysadmins.

[laurencerowe]

Running a public data portal our egress is higher than our storage costs. (We now proxy downloads through a direct connect to our university network...)

Remember to account for future reductions in storage costs. S3 has come down from $0.1500/GB month in 2010 to $0.0300/GB month today. And the recently introduced infrequent access storage tier is under half that again at $0.0125/GB month. It's now significantly cheaper to use S3/Azure/Google than running the storage ourselves.