Re: Press X to Doubt
But there's absolutely no way that operating 18 petabytes of storage could cost "less than $200,000 a year". In salary alone, having the competent workers operating it would cost probably five times that.
$1M in salaries to run perhaps a couple racks of storage in two (or more) physical locations for HA? After the initial design and set-up, taking care of the storage should not be a full time job at all and I'd expect the storage admins to also partake in other infrastructure work or vice versa.
Now, if the devs and other users are constantly asking for changes or new file shares, object storage, block LUNs and such then it could be full time for a single person, but at that point automating a self-service portal or carving out a limited management to their own piece of storage could be arranged. That hardware itself requires very little work.
"I doubt they'll have S3 SLAs with their in-house solution"
Amazon Computing & S3 SLA's allow several minutes of downtime each month without giving back any credits.
Reaching 100% with mid-range storage with proper infrastructure in place (power, cooling, cabling, monitoring etc) is not hard at all.
It's annoying on both side: the cloud sycophants and the on-prem nuts.
Agreed.