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Comment by freakynit

5 days ago

Enterprise grade nvme ssd's typically cost around 150$/TB. For RF of 3, this comes to around: 400 x 3 x 150: 180K USD. With a minimum of 5 year lifecycle for these enterprise SSD's, we are looking at 36K USD/year.

Going through their pricing (https://planetscale.com/pricing?engine=vitess&cluster=M-5120...), for just 15TB storage with RF=3, the pricing comes to around 24000 USD/MONTH, not year. Adjusted for 400TB and per year, this becomes 7.6 million usd. Of course, you also get a lot more, but, the difference is just insane.

That comparison doesn't make any sense at all, and you can't excuse it by tossing out "Of course, you also get a lot more". This is like evaluating the price of wheels by buying entire cars. You wouldn't get dozens of these servers just for capacity, you'd get a custom quote.

That said at $24K you could pay off an entire server like that from Dell in 4 months despite Dell charging something stupid like $2000/TB.

  • Lets hear your numbers then.

    • Your numbers are basically fine for what you're measuring, if you round up to factor in actually having servers to put the storage drives into. So 40-50k instead of 36k.

      The issue is your budget is for 400TB of data but minimal requests per second. That's a valid thing to consider, but it's extremely apples and oranges to a fleet of 75 high powered servers.

      To put it a different way, their prices are pretty high but the calculation of powerful servers costing 40x as much as raw storage isn't "insane".