At one of my clients we manage a petabyte heirachical storage system (mixed offline tape storage, near-line cache storage and online disk storage) and several high capacity (e.g. 15TB) SAN enclosures. These devices are not cheap.

However, all is not lost – there is a blog post from BackBlaze thats doing the rounds on the web that is particularly interesting. To summarise they show how to build high capacity storage devices on the cheap using off the shelf components. In the GIS world if you work with raster data a lot, or produce tile cached web mapping services, you can quickly run up a large tally of disk space. If you are a little bit technically inclined, building BackBlaze style storage could be a great business opportunity and be of great benifit to your GIS using clients. Here’s hoping that someone picks up on this opportunity here in South Africa….