I would have some smart-ass comment here but I just read your HN profile. Good day, Sir.

smart move ;-)

This is what always gets in my way. It takes a lot of work and a lot of expertise to put together a home-grown system that works as well as one from the major vendors. If you're only going to be using one or two, you're much better off going to one of those major vendors because a large part of the price is their expertise and testing that went into it. For a large setup like Backblaze they can spread the cost of design over many systems, but for smaller companies it just isn't feasible.

We hacker types love to think that we could do the same thing in no time with little budget, and I'm sure we could get a first approximation. But the devil is in the details. Debugging the complex interaction of 20 different hardware components is not my idea of fun.

Hats off to them, particularly for sharing.

I did this as an inhouse backup for a data warehousing app. Just slapping 4 ide cards into a case and putting 16x250gb IDE drives on them resulted in a system that would copy about 1 disk worth before hanging with some fault or suddenly dropping to 1% speed.

Just because you can in theory hook 40 drives to n cards doesn't mean it will work - well done to them

Secondary revenue streams anyone? I know we'd be interested in becoming a customer if Backblaze at some point decided to monetize this part of their knowledge too.

This seems like an opportunity to disrupt from the low end of the market for some scrappy enterprising engineers. If they don't do it, someone should.

I don't think it takes quite as much effort as you imply, since a fairly basic storage array from one of the major vendors is $100k. (And then there's "maintenance" and software upgrades, but that's a separate matter).

Even if you got a $100/hr consultant, $100k would be half a year. I suggest it could be done in half that time, by someone who has suitable background. Someone with the specific expertise should be able to do it in 6 weeks elapsed and 2 weeks of full time work, tops. (bt; dt)