[lagadu]

> and then maybe 750 grand a year for the staff salaries.

That is completely unrealistic, it arguably won't even cover the operations teams that you need to have in place for keeping it running and the teams for maintaining and updating the software are going to be a lot more than that.

[Annatar]

Even two good full stack, experienced system engineers are enough, and their combined salaries won’t come anywhere close to 750 grand a year. Hell we could engineer you high performing, high availability infrastructure around it for just several grand, and you won’t find any of the usual enterprise garbage like DELL/hp/Cisco/hardware RAID/SAN in the delivered solution because we design our own systems from bottom to top for performance, reliability and economy. Are such people hard to find? Yes they are, but it’s clear why.

A colleague and myself handle many such applications by automating the living daylights out of everything around them. I just finished SAS integration system engineering project, fully automated. Two weeks’ worth of work which took the previous engineer six months non-stop. 750 grand was a generous overkill.