| > Since you only have one, they are gonna be on call 24/7, so assume you’ll burn them out after a year and a half and need to hire a new one.... This person's entire job is managing a few racks of hard drives? How often do you think they're actually going to get called in? > Since redundancy is a thing, double that $350k. True, but you can do redundancy for cheaper with parity or tape. > And 10pb is what they have now so double it again for 20pb. > So probably you are looking at a million dollars of capital plus labor to actually execute on this. You can go a couple PB at a time if the upfront cost is daunting. > Add in $10k per rack for switches, routers, wires, etc. Yep, though that's not very much in comparison. > Plus all the configuration management that needs to be built up. Not to mention monitoring. So maybe a quarter of work just to have it functional. This is the one I'd really worry about. > I haven’t even factored in opportunity costs. What could this business be doing that adds more value than building out a little data center? You always have to keep opportunity costs in mind, but something like this can pay for itself in under a year if there's significant bandwidth cost too, and that's an amazing ROI. |
Not often. But the server gods are a cruel mistress and it will definitely shit the bed when you are on your honeymoon, or maybe the day after your first kid is born.