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Comment by petrilli | Hacker News Reader

The difficulty sometimes in comparing is, as this post points out, people don't include all the "other" costs that often dwarf the hardware costs. Power, cooling, bandwidth, etc., all cost money, and when you're not buying a lot of them, they cost a LOT of money. The cost of equipment is usually a fraction of the TCO.

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To say nothing of personnel. A Netapp NAS box doesn't do you a whole lot of good unless you've got staff to manage it --- a lot of the justification for cloud offerings, particularly PaaS, is that some of those staff functions get effectively outsourced.

I'll add:

Cloud storage has a tremendous advantage over a local NAS when your apartment/house/office/campus burns down.

I found the article kind of strange. The author spends a lot of time and effort building up math that makes the case for rolling your own NAS, but then softens up when tearing that case down. Nasuni is a cloud storage company, so I'm a little confused.

It appears that the author reached the correct conclusion: the correct solution considers the requirements before arriving at a solution. IMO, the article would be much clearer if it focused on a specific use case. There are many different situations that require large amounts of storage.

If you run a video production studio, it probably makes more sense to use a local NAS like NetApp, because you're going to move a lot of data every single day. The bandwidth costs are going to eat your lunch. In that case, a local NAS makes sense.

If you run a website, cloud storage makes a lot more sense. All of your bits are going to go across the wire, so whether your NAS is local is less significant. Having the data closer to users and maintaining a high level of up-time is more important.

It's important to note that the Nasuni product (I am employee) makes cloud storage behave very much like local storage. We're not a "cloud storage" company so much as a gateway to enable companies to securely use cloud storage and have it behave like a local NAS.

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