[ivan78]

"The one most valuable asset at Oyster.com is our photo collection. ... In strict accordance with KISS methodology, we opted against LTO and S3, and decided to build a big BOX."

I can only imagine how much they will be scared each time they need install updates or reboot THE BOX. They will eventually decide to build identical BOX and mirror their data on daily basis. Then they will notice that mirroring such big volumes of data is wasting tooo much system resources and start evaluating in-house distributed storage solutions, such as OpenStack Swift. Then they will notice it is way too overcomplicated and finally decide migrate their data to Amazon S3.

I'm writing it as a person who walked the same path over the last few years. :-)