
For $5 Million You Can Buy Enough Storage to Compete with Google - iamelgringo
http://www.highscalability.com/5-million-you-can-buy-enough-storage-compete-google
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tlrobinson
This is highly misleading.

First of all, a $5 million cluster could only serve a small fraction of
Google's customers. Google is estimated to have nearly half a million servers
worldwide... there's a reason they have that kind of capacity.

And more importantly, Google's most valuable asset is their employees and
intellectual property, which is worth a hell of a lot more than $5 million
(according to their market cap approx $200 billion minus their datacenters,
offices, etc)

But their point that with $5 million you could build a significant cluster is
a good one. Definitely not Google-worthy though.

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bayareaguy
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.h...](http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/revenues_q107.html)
) 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...](http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/01/mapreducing-20-petabytes-
per-day.html) 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.

