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It is an apples to oranges comparison because Blackblaze is only including the cost of components in that graph for their solution, but they're including all of

It is an apples to oranges comparison because Blackblaze is only including the cost of components in that graph for their solution, but they're including all of the research, development, assembly, and support costs in the other vendors' solutions. What are the labor costs for testing all their hardware (with 10 sata controllers no less)? What are the labor costs for assembling all those systems? What is the labor costs of developing the system architecture? What are the labor costs of creating their storage application which reduces their need for in-box redundancy? And if you want to talk about Amazon there is data center rental, power, cooling, and ongoing administration. In short, they're comparing the costs of their components to the costs of a ready-to-go solution from other vendors. Sounds like apples and oranges to me.

easp 17y ago
They did invite these criticisms by drawing comparisons to S3, EMC, etc. However, they already tried to factor out the cost of operations so that s3 was on equal footing with the non-service offerings. We can quibble about the specific numbers they used, but I think the bigger quibble is that by their own estimates, those costs are substantial, seemingly far outstripping their hardware costs by something like an order of magnitude. Even so, at the scale of a pentabyte or more, the savings are substantial enough to be worth addressing. As for the missing costs that you cite, think this through. What do you really think the per-unit costs for assembly and testing are? Even if each unit required a couple of man-days, the costs would probably only add ~10% or so per unit. The other costs you cite for the initial hardware and software engineering are fixed costs, the same whether they are storing 1PB or 1,000. Also, if they did their job right, much of the per-unit testing cost should be mitigated by the overall systems design. The system management automation can do a test cycle on new nodes before promoting them to production use, and of course, failures should be dealt with automatically.
russss 17y ago
Good point, but I suspect even given the amount of money they've spent on development, and given the production runs on these things are tiny, they'll probably still beat Sun on total price. Hell, even if they only made one of the things they could spend $800k on developing/manufacturing it and still beat Sun. As far as I'm concerned, you'd have to write the custom software even if you used Sun's boxes. I wouldn't trust data to a single machine of anyone's design. Though that's probably just me. The S3 comparison is totally invalid though, I agree.

easp 17y ago

They did invite these criticisms by drawing comparisons to S3, EMC, etc. However, they already tried to factor out the cost of operations so that s3 was on equal footing with the non-service offerings. We can quibble about the specific numbers they used, but I think the bigger quibble is that by their own estimates, those costs are substantial, seemingly far outstripping their hardware costs by something like an order of magnitude. Even so, at the scale of a pentabyte or more, the savings are substantial enough to be worth addressing. As for the missing costs that you cite, think this through. What do you really think the per-unit costs for assembly and testing are? Even if each unit required a couple of man-days, the costs would probably only add ~10% or so per unit. The other costs you cite for the initial hardware and software engineering are fixed costs, the same whether they are storing 1PB or 1,000. Also, if they did their job right, much of the per-unit testing cost should be mitigated by the overall systems design. The system management automation can do a test cycle on new nodes before promoting them to production use, and of course, failures should be dealt with automatically.

russss 17y ago

Good point, but I suspect even given the amount of money they've spent on development, and given the production runs on these things are tiny, they'll probably still beat Sun on total price. Hell, even if they only made one of the things they could spend $800k on developing/manufacturing it and still beat Sun. As far as I'm concerned, you'd have to write the custom software even if you used Sun's boxes. I wouldn't trust data to a single machine of anyone's design. Though that's probably just me. The S3 comparison is totally invalid though, I agree.