"After pricing options from Dell, Sun, NetApp, Amazon S3 and EMC, the company found it could build its own storage servers for a fraction of the cost.
"'As we investigated these traditional off-the-shelf solutions, we became increasingly disillusioned by the expense,' wrote Nufire. '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.'
"Backblaze's solution — a 4U rack-mounted Linux-based server that contains 67 terabytes at a cost of $7,867, or a little more than 11 cents a gigabyte — adds just 44 percent to the cost of the hard drives."
