Not really.

http://shopping.yahoo.com/721280117-supermicro-sc216-e2-r900...

That's a chassis for 2.5" disks so you'd be looking at 60x1TB disks, and that would mean 3 of those enclosures. Now rack them somewhere and add power - still much more than a couple of grand, we haven't even paid for the disks yet...

Yeah, I was a tad hyperbolic in just referring to the disks. I would expect the costs to be around $20/GB/year when you also factor in power - bigger drives are making a difference, but the other factors always cost more than the disks themselves.

It doesn't change the fact that 60TB is tiny for a company whose every product involves storing enormous quantities of data and serving them at monstrous scale.

And according to the GFS paper their are three copies of every chunk in a GFS cluster so that is 180TB, and they probably don't depend on one GFS cluster to meet their availability guidelines so if you had two that is really 320TB (180TB * 2).

And the amazing part is if you are in an open event where Google is talking about their infrastructure in general terms you will realize that that has to be mouse nuts compared to the amount of 'spinning rust' they have going on at any one time.

Absolutely agree!

Sorry, posted wrong chassis. Look for the SC847, that's 45x 3,5" in 4U. With 32x 2T S-ATA you're looking at roughly $5000 (incl. disks).

And Google likely gets them quite a bit cheaper than that.

Eh, I was definitely lowballing a lot with "a couple grand." You also need to factor in power and replication.

Not sure what you mean. It's still a couple grand when you factor in power and replication. ;-)

For google it's a rounding error either way. They measure in Petabytes, not Terabytes.