Then there was a contract which had a server room twice the size and mostly contained an AS/3<mumble> and a couple racks of Intel hardware. You could probably get a ping pong table into that one. Giant rooms that are mostly white and too cold are a little freaky, and reminiscent of 2001.
There have been a number of stories of people not being able to utilize their floor space for more servers because they ran out of space on the roof for AC units. At one point I recall Google was working on power dissipation because they had hit the max electrical code, and so no one would agree to run more power into their buildings. More servers meant more compute per watt and per ton of chillers.
That's obviously not something you can do on a whim, but at the same time we're talking about a seven figures investment plus the time to build the in-house team to manage this, so it's not going to happen overnight anyway.
> - System hardware: $500,000
For one PB? Gold plated HDDs and cases I guess…
> Assume 15% annual system maintenance over five years
Do not run your hard drive cluster on the same floor as vibration-inducing machines, folks. /s
According to Backblaze, even a 8 year-old hard drive is still twice more reliable than this, and 15% failure rate is what to expect over 6 years of consecutive use!
> Assume the space needed to store 1PB is between 25%-50% of a standard rack (42U)
You can fit almost 10PB in a rack though, so that's another figure that they've inflated.
> Assume personnel costs to manage a 1PB system are 0.5 IT/storage admin FTE
This one is probably true (and it's even an underestimation) if you have only 1PB of data, but it's not going to scale linearly: you're never going to need 130 FTE for 260PB.
Overall, if a supplier (who's going to use the same kind of off-the-shelf tech as you would) claims that his price is 4 times cheaper that what it would cost you to run it by yourself, he's probably just lying to sell you stuff, just saying…
Oct 2020, StorONE announced a 1PB All-Flash array for $499k.
Other examples which are close to their pricing. https://www.reddit.com/r/storage/comments/vdr6ql/pricing_exa...
No doubt about that, when you have tens of thousands of drive you end up replacing some of them all the time, but not 15% of them every year…
> Oct 2020, StorONE announced a 1PB All-Flash array for $499k.
With Optane and all, right? The kind of things that's a massive overkill if your workload allows you to use Glacier…
> Other examples which are close to their pricing.
In that list, the only offers that are close to this pricing (but still almost 20% cheaper) also includes several years of support (which you probably don't want if you're Canva's scale).
mind you the price of flash storage has dropped significantly since 2020.
Hard disks are still being used, but having all flash systems is not uncommon.
Also, it seams that it's 230PB in total, not per month.