Low-Hanging Fruit

Capacity Planning

Here's the number I was looking for the other day: 2,200,000 iTools users.

Now, multiply that number by 15 MB, to get the amount of storage necessary for mail only, if everybody fills their quota: 33,000,000 MB. Multiply the number of members by 100 MB to get the amount of storage necessary for iDisk space, if everybody fills their quota: 220,000,000 MB. Divide the megabytes by 1024 to get gigabytes, then again to get terabytes: 31.47 TB for mail, 209.8 TB for iDisk.

That's before you take into account the additional space needed for fault tolerance. Gigantic IDE disks from Western Digital may be cheap, but EMC hasn't heard.

Generally speaking, people don't use all of the storage you provide. Text files and PNG images are small. But, .mac's role as a waystation in this digital life wants big files that will fill up the quota: high-resolution photographs, movies, music, backups of your important documents. The only thing keeping Apple's disk farm from being overloaded is a 56K dial-up connection — and $99 per year.

1:07:22 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry, Low-Hanging Fruit