Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage | Backblaze Blog

Before realizing that we had to solve this storage problem ourselves, we considered Amazon S3, Dell or Sun Servers, NetApp Filers, EMC SAN, etc. As we investigated these traditional off-the-shelf solutions, we became increasingly disillusioned by the expense. When you strip away the marketing terms and fancy logos from any storage solution, data ends up on a hard drive. But when we priced various off-the-shelf solutions, the cost was 10 times as much or more than the raw hard drives. Here’s a comparison chart of the price for one petabyte from various venders:

via Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage | Backblaze Blog.