247 Petabyte ~ 247000 Terabyte > 50000 USD.
Network cards, bandwidth, electricity cost > I can't guess.
Couple of good engineers (hardware and software ones), which they definitely have.
May be they could have built their own cloud in < ~10-15 million USD. And that won't be recurring cost.
May be they missed article about Bank of America saving ~2 Billion USD, by building their own cloud.
> Network cards, bandwidth, electricity cost > I can't guess.
This is where a huge amount of cost is.
> And that won't be recurring cost.
Maintenance, humans, cooling, drive replacements, property, building, land tax, payroll tax are all recurring costs.
Let take another setup of same count as backup. Then another setup as back up of back up. ~150K
> This is where a huge amount of cost is.
Maintenance, humans, cooling, drive replacements cost > can't be greater than first time set up cost.
> property, building, land tax, payroll tax
Nasa runs on Government budget, I am sure they can claim some tax break there.
The point I am trying to make is, it may be cheaper to do in-house with the level of engineering talent they have.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2
Use backblaze pods, demand off peak bandwidth of gilded age megacorps that own said fiber for sync/replication.
https://www.backblaze.com/b2/storage-pod.html 480TB/4U
Have 3x sites around the US the build the pods, each new pod gets preloaded with a smattering of rarely requested and low replication count objects (as a redundant backup). Then shipped to the site where it will be used. Local writes go directly to pods which are then kept in sync with the rest of the cluster.
edit, from the TFA
``` And to put a cherry on top, the report found the project's organizers didn't consult widely enough, didn't follow NIST data integrity standards, and didn't look for savings properly during internal reviews, in part because half of the review team worked on the project itself. ```
Now I am more curious why go along with AWS instead of using Openstack. Need to find some case study of openstack vs rest of cloud provider.
I suspect that ideas like this will become more popular as the US asks itself "what happened to our resilience?"