AWS would charge you about $1 million a month to load and store 1 petabyte, which sounds good until you realize that Google also has several hundred thousand pr

AWS would charge you about $1 million a month to load and store 1 petabyte, which sounds good until you realize that Google also has several hundred thousand processors. If you only needed 100,000 small EC2 instances, that would cost you at least $10 million a month. Now suppose you need 1,000 managers and engineers to deliver all the same services. If the average cost is $10k/month each that's another $10 million a month. So even with some pretty naive assumptions, the storage cost is less than 5% overall. GOOG's own 2007 statement ( http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/revenues_q107.html http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/revenues_q107.h... ) says their operating expenses were closer to $1B for the full year, which is about 4x this. It also says they have closer to 12k full time employees. Given that http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/01/mapreducing-20-petabytes-per-day.html http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/01/mapreducing-20-petabytes... claims to be doing 20PB MapReduce jobs, they obviously need a lot more than 5PB. Still I bet their storage component is a lot closer to 1% of the total operating costs.