[ Thanks to Paul
Shread for this link. ]
“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.”