This person's entire job is managing a few racks of hard drives? How often do you think they're actually going to get called in?
> Since redundancy is a thing, double that $350k.
True, but you can do redundancy for cheaper with parity or tape.
> And 10pb is what they have now so double it again for 20pb.
> So probably you are looking at a million dollars of capital plus labor to actually execute on this.
You can go a couple PB at a time if the upfront cost is daunting.
> Add in $10k per rack for switches, routers, wires, etc.
Yep, though that's not very much in comparison.
> Plus all the configuration management that needs to be built up. Not to mention monitoring. So maybe a quarter of work just to have it functional.
This is the one I'd really worry about.
> I haven’t even factored in opportunity costs. What could this business be doing that adds more value than building out a little data center?
You always have to keep opportunity costs in mind, but something like this can pay for itself in under a year if there's significant bandwidth cost too, and that's an amazing ROI.
