Decreased cost of doing business, especially disk storage

In preparation for a presentation that I am doing today at the BYU Genealogy and Family History, I have done some research on the reduced costs of modern technology businesses. One of the distinct advantages that WorldVitalRecords is enjoying is the reduced cost of doing business over our more established competitors.

These cost reductions include not just hardware such as disk space, RAM, and CPU speed (MIPS) but also the cost reduction of using open source operating systems and applications such as search engines. Linux and Lucene are two of examples of open source OS and applications that we use.

The cost comparison between a server operating system (OS), such as XP Server, and Linux incalculable because you will get a “divide by zero” error. Linux, the denominator in the equation, is free. Plug the cost of any serious server OS prior to LINUX into the equation and the can see this cost is zero. So the practical reduction in business costs is $X down to $0.

The cost reduction of disk storage space is spectacular and almost as dramatic. This price reduction has been fairly constant since the 1950s. I found this great chart that shows the dramatic decline in costs: www.berghell.com/whitepapers/Projecting%20the%20Cost%20of%20Magnetic%20Storage%20Over%20the%20Next%2010%20years.pdf.

The term Terabyte, which means one thousand Gigabytes, first entered my vocabulary in the early 1990s. It was use to describe the size of the Library of Congress. That was difficult for me to fathom. At that time gigabyte (a thousand megabytes) was still almost too big to understand as well.

At that time, I still had a hard rive on my personal computer that was measured in megabytes. And it took me 6 months to save money to buy that 19 megabyte hard drive. Before that, the first hard drive that I had easy access to was a mere 5 megabyte drive. That was all you could get on an IBM XT in 1983. Before that, PCs only had floppy drives that were measured in hundreds of kilobytes.

To illustrate the size and scope of these changes in costs and capacity, I recently purchased a 4 gigabyte “postage stamp size” SD chip for my Treo. That paper thin chip has 200 times capacity than my first 19 megabyte hard drive. That hard drive was about the size a shoe box AND made an annoying high-pitched whine AND put off enough heat to heat my office in the winter.

Back to the point of this BLOG, ten years ago, when Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org were scaling up to store census images, the cost per Terabyte for Hardware RAID (redundant and self correcting storage) had a cost of USD $110,772. During the past 10 years that number has fallen to USD $505. This is the equivalent cost of 2 quarters compared to a hundred dollar bill.

This means that now that WorldVitalRecords.com is scaling up to store the thousands of databases that we are adding at a rapid rate we can buy storage space for less than 1/2 of 1%. This amazing cost reduction allows us to buy new, high-speed hard drives for less than then carrying cost and maintenance of the hard drives of the past.

The timing of our company launch gives us a cost advantage of these recent price reductions. This is just one of the reasons that we can offer a much lower priced membership than our older and more established competition.