Okay, I admit it, I am not an Apple fan boy, I am a linux fan boy, let’s forget about bad PR just for a minute here as I don’t really like getting mad anyways.
The BIG NEWS this week is that there’s a way to build a Perabyte (or 1,000,000 gigabytes) Cloud Server for under $120,000.
BackBlaze, a company that provides unlimited online backups for just $5/month, has just released their company’s secret. They can build this “perabyte” cloud server for just about $117,000. Compared that to Dell’s $826,000 or Amazon EC’s $2M equivalent storage space.
Perhaps they did provide this HOWTO as a marketing ploy but it’s a very honest marketing ploy and I am buying it. 🙂
I have to say I am highly impressed that BackBlaze had the courage to share their knowledge to the world. I see that their web traffic has skyrocketed overnight, must be getting a lot of new customers. (I am even thinking about signing up for their backup service, maybe they can give me one free so I can test it out for the next couple years? hahaha, I love free stuff.)
You can read full instructions on their blog here.
In essence, they just showed you how to start a storage server company at the minimal cost. Of course, there’s more involved than just making servers but still, they just solved 90% of the overhead for you.
Before realizing that we had to solve this storage problem ourselves, we considered Amazon S3, Dell or Sun Servers, NetApp Filers, EMC SAN, etc. As we investigated these traditional off-the-shelf solutions, we became increasingly disillusioned by the expense. When you strip away the marketing terms and fancy logos from any storage solution, data ends up on a hard drive. But when we priced various off-the-shelf solutions, the cost was 10 times as much (or more) than the raw hard drives. Here’s a comparison chart of the price for one petabyte from various venders:
