there are several things you can do. - First, like you indicated is: you can take less margin (and believe me, there's still considerable margin). - You ca

there are several things you can do. - First, like you indicated is: you can take less margin (and believe me, there's still considerable margin). - You can play with erasure coding policy. (n+10)/n makes that you can tolerate 10 failures. a higher n makes your storage overhead less. (which means more margin) - you can use even fancier storage schemes (fe online codes will make your storage overhead something like 3%) - you can use cheaper hardware. - ...