Four days ago, I published an article in which I wrote:
I think I have written the following statement at least a dozen times: "The price of disk storage keeps dropping." Today I am writing that statement one more time.
Now, only four days later, I am writing about still ANOTHER huge drop in the price of disk storage. Yes, "the price of disk storage keeps dropping."
Backblaze , the cloud-based backup provider that I have written about several times (see http://goo.gl/gpi9L), has revealed how it continues to offer online storage at very low prices. Backblaze builds its own 135 terabyte Storage Pods which cost just $7,384 in parts.
I did some math: that works about $55 per terabyte or roughly five cents per gigabyte.
Large disk arrays typically cost tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of dollars. The price of just over $7,000 is amazing. Quoting from the article by Sebastian Anthony:
Beyond detailing the creation of Storage Pod 2.0, Backblaze also provides some interesting insights into the world of cloud storage. In terms of raw hardware, 1 petabyte now only costs about $57,000. Using Storage Pods, Backblaze can provide 1 petabyte with power, rack space, and bandwidth for three years, for just $95,000. By comparison, 1 petabyte of storage using Dell’s PowerVault arrays costs no less than $502,000 over three years. If you want to store 1 petabyte in Amazon’s S3 cloud, it will cost you just under $2.5 million.
Backblaze attributes its ongoing success to its ultra-frugal Storage Pods. While competitors in the online backup space are closing down or hiking prices up wildly, Backblaze still manages to offer unlimited, secure backup for $5/month.
If you have any experience in computer hardware, you might be interested in reading the article by Sebastian Anthony at ExtremeTech.com at http://goo.gl/gU8qL.
What surprised me is how simple the task of building these arrays seems to be. Anyone who has ever assembled a Windows or Linux computer probably could build a 135-terabyte, or bigger, disk array in a day or so. Of course, that assumes there's enough money in the piggy bank to pay $7,384 for the required parts. Backblaze also had to write some software to make it all work together.
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