That's a trivial number for sharing between a small user base of, in my case, 150 employees.
What am I missing? You're talking about maybe $60k retail cost in high read speed SANs that are likely already in place for a business of this size anyway? (Probably purchased a few years ago for under $30k. At least mine are.) In a US data center I'm paying a flat rate for rack space, so power consumption isn't a consideration anyway, but honestly it really isn't that much power even if I was being billed for it.
It's really nothing. An overlooked line item on a budget sheet.
So the real cost if I were to self host is video cards. But as mentioned previously, that's not reduced by smaller data sets, it's reduced by better weighted models, right? Let me know if I'm mistaken, please.
I'm very interested to be persuaded otherwise as a decision maker. Thanks for your insight and ideas.
Considering all of the above, I'm currently of the mind that a lower cost model that makes more mistakes is much more expensive in net, actually. So I prefer the most accurate, better weighted model, not the slimmer data set.