[throwawaysml]

Yev, would you ever consider opening the software and hardware design of the vault?

It seems that you could lead this and give the industry a standard way, with vendors producing the fitting hardware, and allowing others to maintain their own vaults. Maybe this is a business advantage you don't want to lose right now. Then, I'm sorry to have asked :). If not then I think you might benefit by lower prices if the hardware is readily available and not a Backblaze custom production run.

There are many places who cannot for technical or won't for political reasons offload their storage to S3 and friends and need it all locally most of the time which would use a vault or two.

[atYevP]

The hardware design of the vault is open! The vaults are running Backblaze v6.0 Storage Pods (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-serv...) and the nice thing is, you can use whatever software you want to run them (we likely won't release the software, but we have talked about parts of it like Reed-Solomon Erasure Coding https://www.backblaze.com/blog/reed-solomon/).

As for getting the servers, there's an entire company that popped up from one of our early storage pod producers, Protocase, you can buy servers (very reasonably priced btw) based on our designs here -> http://www.45drives.com/.