Petabytes on a Budget: How to Build Cheap Cloud Storage

Backblaze’s Tim Nufire on how they built out their storage infrastructure:

The result is a 4U rack-mounted Linux-based server that contains 67 terabytes at a material cost of $7,867, the bulk of which goes to purchase the drives themselves. This translates to just three-tenths of one penny per gigabyte per month over the course of three years. Even including the surrounding costs — such as electricity, bandwidth, space rental, and IT administrators’ salaries — Backblaze spends one-tenth of the price in comparison to using Amazon S3, Dell Servers, NetApp Filers, or an EMC SAN.

★ Wednesday, 2 September 2009