Big storage on the cheap
July 29, 2005, 4:00 AM PDT
By Michael Kanellos

Enthusiasts learned to build their own PCs decades ago. Now you can assemble a storage system in your living room that could make the Pentagon jealous. San Francisco-based Capricorn Technologies has crafted, and released under an open-source license, blueprints that effectively let someone build multi-terabyte and multi-petabyte storage systems fairly inexpensively.

The company also builds its own line of storage systems, called the PetaBox, and has landed deals with several universities and research departments with its low-budget approach. How cheap are they? Capricorn's storage systems cost about $2 a gigabyte, said the company's chief executive, C.R. Saikley.

At that price, the cost breakdown would be about 65 cents for the gigabyte of storage and $1.35 for racks, software, networking, management tools and other components. That means that a Capricorn 1-terabyte system (which consists of 1,000 gigabytes) would sell for about $2,000, while a 1-petabyte system (1,000 terabytes) would cost about $2 million.

By contrast, a petabyte-class storage system from EMC might cost $20 a gigabyte, while similar systems from smaller companies might cost $10 a gigabyte, said Arun Taneja, an analyst with Taneja Group. A petabyte-class storage system will run into the millions, said an EMC spokesman.

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