EMC = Es Muy Costoso

I suspect they charge that much because their target customers (large enterprise) have IT departments who are willing to drink the kool aid. Those customers keep buying costly, less-flexible systems, and pay a premium for it. Heck, less than 10 years ago even Avid had standardized their FibreChannel products on EMC Clariion, and passed those costs onto their customers. Again, people bought into it. Did it work? Yes. Were there less-expensive options equally capable? Yes. Did Avid support them? No.

Companies like NetApp, Isilon, and BlueArc are costlier than off-the-shelf hardware because of the engineering and support required by customers. They also have their own IP (intellectual property) that they've invested heavily into. I can't say that EMC has the same level of IP as some of the others, but I don't know that they don't. I just know that on a pure per-TB basis, they are off the chart.

By "rolling their own", Backblaze is taking that extra support and engineering burden on themselves. Surely that $7867 number doesn't include the countless manhours incurred with all of that procurement, engineering, and testing, nor whatever time was spent optimizing the open source code to meet their requirements. It also can't include the manhours required to maintain and replace faulty hardware going forward. Is there any guarantee those parts will be available 2 or 3 years from now? What will they do when they're not?

Amazon has their own cloud storage offering that they started rolling out a couple of years ago. http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/ Although I doubt Amazon is building their own storage, they are offering the same type of service as Backblaze.

---Ken

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 8:39 AM, Greg Whynott Greg.Whynott@oicr.on.cawrote:

That "COST OF A PETABYTE" image really puts things in perspective in terms of how much you pay for 'vendor value add'..

EMC = 2.8 MILLION. ok EMC representatives on the list, please explain what we are paying an extra 3 MILLION for.... is it the polo logo? 8)

and what the heck is Amazon doing on there? don't they sell books online? I must be way behind the times...

-g

http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/

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