[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.