Hard disks are cheap, hosted disk space isn’t – why ?

This post was kindly contributed by Blogging about all things SAS - go there to comment and to read the full post.

Because nobody has decided to disrupt the market and make oodles of disk space available at little or no cost.

I can now purchase a 1tb external hard drive for about NZD $99.  This is for the disk and the external drive inclosure.

I can get a dropbox account with 2GB of disk storage free.  But its USD $20 a month for 100GB, so $2,400 a year for 1TB

I can buy Rackspace files at USD $150 a month for 1TB (@ 15 cents a GB), so USD $1,800 a year.

Mozy.com will cost me USD $5.99 a month for 50GB or USD 9.99 for 125GB, again USD 1,000 ish for 1TB

Or even worse I can get a web hosting account with 5GB for NZD $60 a month  (ok it is in NZ!).

NZ backup specific sites will do 10GB for NZD $90 a month, a whopping NZD $108,000 a year!

So yes I know there needs to be fail over (ok so NZD $200 for two 1tb disks) and people and additional hardware and traffic and redundancy, and redundancy and a bit more redundancy (its like the fact we have to say backup 3 times in a row before making changes .

But you still have to say there is an opportunity for somebody to make the hosting of raw data more of a commodity. (or at least host a dropbox server in NZ so I dont get whacked with international traffic charges for uploading and downloading files!)

I did think about why google doesnt offer free storage (aka extend their gmail concept) perhaps its because its harder to show ads to generate revenue as you put the files there and don;t really touch them again unless needed.  And also not so much valuable information to mine like there is in emails and website logs.

So what has this got to do with SAS, not a lot.

BUt if you think about it, lots of people always go on about how expensive SAS is.  But if there were cheaper alternatives, wouldn’t people buy them and SAS go under (or at least stop the constant year on year growth?)

This post was kindly contributed by Blogging about all things SAS - go there to comment and to read the full post.