[mc32]

What does AWS do when someone moves 500PB of storage off of their systems? Do they sit idle till some other big customer comes along or is their growth so phenomenal that a 500PB move off doesn't even slow new (storage) deployments at all and just keep up their pace?

[late2part]

with no actual facts, i'll speculate.

let's assume they have 12 buildings at each region with 500 racks in each. 6k racks

Let's assume that S3 is 1/4 of their infrastructure.

Let's assume you can put 60 * 12TB disks in 4U and they use 52 racks. That's 136012TB per cabinet or 9.4PB per rack.

1500 racks at 9.4PB raw capacity with RF=2.1 so best case that's that's 1500 * 9.4 / 2.1 = 6700PB at a site.

So 500PB would be 7% of the space.

They're probably growing 5-15% per month like most hot companies now, so that's 1-2 month's growth.

Of course these numbers are certainly off. But probably in the magnitudinal ballpark.

[mc32]

My guess (and it's a terrible guess) is this may be about 4mo growth... and they might take the opp to retire older lower capacity drives and just keeping up the build-out.

But who knows...

[chis]

If you're ordering 500 petabytes you probably sign a contract with Amazon, and have to let them know in advance if you want out.

[mc32]

That's a good point --but they didn't start with 500PB, when they first went to AWS they probably only used a few PB to begin with and grew "organically" over the years. But likely still had some contractual stuff for this kind of scenario.

[ramshanker]

12 TB Disks are pretty recent phenomenon, not 3 to 4 years ago when Dropbox did this exercise. Backblaze numbers are a good source. So adjusting your calculation, that should be 3 Month No-Storage-Buyout scenario.

[user5994461]

There are hard quota enforced on storage. You will have to fill a truckload of forms to get your quota raised to 500PB.

I personally never asked for that much but I'd speculate that they won't give you that in any single region.

[qaq]

Directly moving out 500PB of data of AWS would cost 20+ million dollars depending on usage patterns might be cheaper to gradually shift usage.

[brianwawok]

Is this including snowmobile?