Amazon S3 price also takes into account having redundancy at three data centers. So you should multiply the cost by 3, just for that. Of course if you don't nee

Amazon S3 price also takes into account having redundancy at three data centers. So you should multiply the cost by 3, just for that. Of course if you don't need the redundancy, you can build it for cheaper. Also for some applications it really does make sense to move away from S3, and have a solution in house. For example The Broad Institute has about 6 petabytes of storage [1]. They in particular benefit from local storage, since all of their data is generated on-site. However, even at this scale, they don't build the boxes themselves [2]. [1] http://www.genome.gov/27538886 http://www.genome.gov/27538886 [2] http://www.isilon.com/press-release/isilon-iq-powers-data-storage-next-generation-dna-sequencing http://www.isilon.com/press-release/isilon-iq-powers-data-st...