You can buy one of these “pods” pre-built for between $3,000 and $7,000, depending on how many hard drive slots you need, from 45 Drives or Blackblaze.

The pods sit in 4U racks and the 6.0 design extends a few inches past the edge, so consider how much space you have in your server room. The open-source design for Backblaze’s newest enclosure claims it can bring the cost down to as little as 3.6 cents per GB of storage, totalling 240TB with all 60 drives accounted for. The software is free, so the remainder comes from the enclosure, racks, and all the components. If you’re building your own cloud server, the hard drives you purchase will largely determine the price point and make up the bulk–estimate at least half and as much as 80 percent–of your investment.

When stripped away of everything but the core function of what all the big enterprise cloud brands do, what you get is as simple as transfering data to and from a hard drive over the internet. We’ll borrow heavily from the knowledge BackBlaze has generously shared with the world. This method has been tried and tested by BackBlaze, a cloud backup company that pioneered this scheme. Consumer-grade hard drives to keep costs low.In this guide, we’ll show you how using a few key ingredients: With a few tricks and a bit of know-how, you can get pedabytes of storage for as little as a tenth of the price as any of those big name brands.

You’re probably considering Amazon S3, Dell, Sun, EMC, and NetApp, among others.īut if you really want to cut costs, take the challenge into your own hands. Whether it’s storage for clients or backups for company data, the big name providers don’t come cheap. If you run a small or medium-sized business that requires a lot of digital storage, the time will come when you need your own cloud.

Map backblaze personal backup