At first glance I thought it was some sort of backup solution, where storing was very cheap, but restoring would be the pricey bit. As soon as I reached the Abacuses and 3,5" floppies I definately knew it was a fake :)
I wonder if there's a real business model there. Most of us restore an extremely small percentage of what we backup. Could you offer a cheaper storage cost than other businesses and make up the difference on the small number of restores that occur?
If you're really that desperate for cheap backups, you'd actually be best off storing terabyte hard drives / SAN boxes around the country, maybe in colo'd buildings.
If you can get the entire operation costing less, then it's fine if restores take longer and cost more... because you pass that fee on to the customer. I for one would be happy to pay less for writes and more for reads, since I read backups far less than I write them.
And it's not about being desperate for savings. It's about reducing the overall cost of a commodity... storage.
I wonder if simply using the backblaze type setup with 'green' drives that are set to 'power down' when not in use would be the best solution? In that case, you'd want to minimize writes as much as reads, but it would make some sense to offer a discount for data that 'just sits there'
On the other hand, I bet that when you buy power 'at scale' you can get your watt-month prices quite a bit below $0.27 (note, you must roll in the cost of both the watt your equipment uses /and/ the watts the a/c system uses to deal with the watt of heat. At the low end, the provider bundles those two, but if you build your own data centre, you need to be careful to build that into your cost assumptions.)
The other problem with doing this at the low end is that where I am, I pay full price for a circuit, no matter how much power I pull off it (the circuit just blows if I get too carried away) and even places that do rent you metered power usually have high costs for rackspace that are not metered, so really, you are only potentially saving two or three bucks a month per disk, even if they were idle all month.
Now, also, 'green' disks are usually really slow. 5900rpm rather than 7200rpm. But they are also really cheap, so if your customers want to accept slow, you can save quite a lot on your CapEx. Like probably half, if you use consumer-grade 'green' drives rather than the 'enterprise sata' I use. Using consumer grade drives has a bunch of other problems that your software will need to account for, too... but that's a place where you potentially could have pretty big savings.
That fell under "storage and redundancy".
Storage = the hardware and electricity required to store/minimally serve the data
redundancy = number of places the data is stored
thusly
cost = storage cost * redundancy
I really hate having to verbosely explain things like this. Is it even remotely possible for you to give me the benefit of the doubt and not assume I'm a blithering moron when I don't expound ad nauseam every little detail of what I'm describing?