rowan

Besides Amazon S3 are there any services that provide scalable, virtually unlimited storage/hosting services? I have a need to archive a growing amount of data and while I could just buy up HDs at this end it will cost a fair bit to transfer the data into the office in Australia (between $0.50 - $5.00 per gig)

At the moment building a custom server with a few 1TB HDs would be far cheaper than S3, but it doesn't scale for future needs (or reduce in monthly cost if I scale down the operation)

Any ideas?

Spudstr

http://hadoop.apache.org/core/
http://kosmosfs.sourceforge.net/

distributed file type system might be worthwhile to look into for you/needs.

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rowan

Build up my own network, adding extra nodes (servers) as needed? That's a good idea too, since it allows for better random access when I actually need to use the data. Hmmm.

brandonstills

everything I've seen is really expensive. Much much cheaper to just store locally.

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rowan

As mentioned above I storing "locally" isn't really the best option because of the cost to transfer data to the office here. Internet is not cheap in AU.

Then again if it's accessed infrequently enough it's pretty much a one-off cost... once to transfer data in, once to write it to a couple of HDs. With S3 you're paying per month for long term storage.