[dilyevsky]

Durability and accessibility is solved problem using erasure coding with automatic recovery. Nothing interesting in this space going on for like 10 years unless you’re pushing planetscale storage.

> It's the per rack operational costs that dwarf them. The cost of electricity, cooling etc

Ok lets do some simple math - lets say you have a few racks with 50PB in there, colocated. Power + floor space + remote hands will not cost you more to than 250k/y and that’s being very generous. Dividing by 50PB thats .5c per gig PER YEAR. Can you explain why GCS/S3 charges 50x that not including egress which is also ridiculous?

[mtnGoat]

Have you seen their private rate cards for this level of buying? I bet if you had your calculus would change here.

Also, it’s easy to beat most costs if you get consumer grade hardware and don’t refresh it more than once a decade. I see that often when folks compare costs, but that’s dishonest and just kind of shoots their credibility in the foot.

[dilyevsky]

Note that we haven’t even started discussing hw costs - tp correctly noted that amortized capex is less than the opex. It doesn’t change the math that much. I had pulled the relevant quotes to make a google sheets model and even with top line hardware i couldn’t stretch the break-even point beyond 2 years.

Private rates are cool except they come with strings attached and even discounted 90% its still not even close to break even on decent sized commits. Purely on costs the cloud cant win whichever way you slice it.

[mtnGoat]

So you’ve never actually had to acquire hardware or run systems at this scale? You’re just doing this on some Google sheets?