Shutterstock has a nearly insatiable appetite for data storage. From its inception, the company — a global provider of licensed photographs, vectors, illustrations and videos — refused to pay higher prices just to stuff its storage needs into somebody else’s cloud. Instead, the almost 10-year-old image-storing warehousing operation built its own server farm and created its own cloud software system at home.
Shutterstock’s storage appetite continued to grow. Towards the end of 2012 it stored some 20 million images. Since then it has added an average of 10,000 images per day. The cost of operating its own cloud storage facility kept the company’s operations budget on a diet, however, thanks to open source technology.