March 30, 2007 (Computerworld) — Amazon.com Inc.’s Web storage service S3 (Simple Storage Service) recently passed the one-year mark. While S3 has gotten many positive mentions in the press, reports from actual customers have been harder to find. At O’Reilly Media Inc.’s Emerging Technology (ETech) conference in San Diego on Wednesday, SmugMug Inc. CEO Don MacAskill stepped up, giving a kiss-and-tell account of his “love affair” with S3 — the good and the bad.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based photo-sharing site, which competes with the likes of Flickr, uses S3 to host about 192TB of photos.
Founded in 2002, SmugMug formerly ran, according to MacAskill’s blog, “single processor commodity Pentium 4 servers attached to really cheap Apple Xserve RAID arrays” to store all of its photos in-house. Even though they were “high-bang-per-buck hardware” running Red Hat Linux, they were much pricier than S3, which charges 15 cents per gigabyte per month. MacAskill, who is also SmugMug’s “chief geek,” estimates that the company has saved almost $700,000 in its first year post-switch.
SmugMug’s fast growth — it was doubling its storage requirements every year — along with the opportunity to offload hardware management issues and “focus on the application, not the muck,” convinced MacAskill to make the change. In its first year with S3, SmugMug spent $230,000 on storage fees, not including the labor cost of transferring existing photos to the new system. That compares with the $922,000 MacAskill figures he would’ve spent on server and storage hardware in the same time period.
Very cool, compliance issues aside, hosting your data on someone elses infrastructure can be a real alternative, as this article discusses. Check it out.Â
I think you’ll find the small/medium startups will use it, and as the business case, the platform is proven, the banks will slowly dab their toes in the water, compliance and data security issues need resolved internally to the bank and externally to the hosting organization.
