eh, I'm working on it right now; I'll be bringing the prgmr.com values, which is to say, the focus is on cheap, standard, and transparent, uptime goals will be... realistic. I'm doing it with my co-author, and I have at least one investor who is interested, though I'm not sure we'll need him... even at our target of a penny per month per replication, it's going to be ridiculously profitable, probably enough so that we likely won't need money. What are you bringing to the table?
I've been thinking for a while about how you could make an S3-like service by loading up 36 drive boxes and shipping them off to lots of different cheap colo providers throughout the country, duplicating storage across them and managing the whole bit on a reliable provider like AWS.
I think there would be a big market to provide $100,000ish per Petabyte collocation, when the hardware gets cheap enough for that.
Am I missing a zero? that's about $0.10 per gigabyte, no? which is dang close to what amazon charges. Unless you mean one hundred grand up front rather than one hundred grand a month.
I mean a upfront cost, and then some monthly hosting fee maybe. Might be a while for hardware to be that cheap.
hm. I think the problem is mostly the profit margin. cheap 3tb drives are what $130 each? and you need 333 or so of those to get 1000gb. If you go with, say, 12 disk zraid2 sets, that'd be around 400 disks. Of course, these are 'seagate petabytes' I'm counting, but that's only $52000 for the disk; then, say 10 of the supermicro chassis;
I think you could do it, I mean, at scale where labor costs are mostly amortized out, if you were willing to accept really low margins, or if someone would design and test it for free.
But that's the thing, someone like me? even a cut-rate dedicated server/VPS provider is used to charging around 1/4th to 1/6th the cost of the hardware /every month/ - obviously, this results in margins that are pretty nice by the standards of companies that sell goods with significant marginal costs, at least if you have enough scale that you don't blow it all on labor.
Really, the "big fee up front" model is interesting and warrants a discussion all it's own.
Prices have gotten so low that there's no excuse for lack of quality online storage providers. There are many, but there is only a handful I would consider good and their pricing isn't following the market. I see this leaving a huge opening for competition.
If anyone else is seriously interested in online storage contact me (see profile).