On 3 July 2014 18:49, Marc A. Pelletier marc@uberbox.org wrote:
Also, 24T is a significant chunk of the space available to Labs in general; storage is nowhere near as inexpensive in our context as would be with off-the-shelf customer-grade disks. There's nothing that prevents us from allocating significant resources to a project that needs it (to wit: open street maps tile generator) but we're not going to do that site unseen and without supervision.
As an aside to this: even were you to do it with crappy consumer-grade disks, you're still looking at the better part of a thousand dollars - the cheapest price for a new off-the-shelf disk looks to be about $35/tb, so perhaps eight hundred dollars or more. Presumably even for crappy disks the costs of putting them in a box and plugging it in are still there, too - call it a round thousand for the cheapest option.
I haven't been following this case, but I would think saying "let's figure out what you want to do before we spend a thousand dollars on it" would be an eminently reasonable position for Marc to take.