With chasing writes you do it in slow periods between traffic bursts since you're basically just pulling them off a queue to process so you don't need to count that in with your peak burst numbers.
Your costs seem really high too. The above system was ~$10K/month on GoGrid including 2 DB servers that were on dedicated servers(not really impressive ones either I think they were ~$500/month each), a load balancer on a dedicated server, 2 dozen webservers or so, a few support servers(admin panels, client interfaces, puppet, etc), and a small hadoop cluster.
Redis would receive the raw data, the DB stored the rolled up data and the raw data/logs would be compressed and go onto a small hadoop cluster in case we needed to process it for a new type or report or look for something specific.