North American Network Operators Group
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RE: EMAIL != FTP

  • From: Roeland Meyer
  • Date: Fri May 25 19:48:15 2001 
> From: Rowland, Alan D [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Friday, May 25, 2001 12:21 PM

> 
> <snip>
> At $99 per 40GB HDD, there is no excuse for lack of space. 
> <snip>
> 
> And the source for this price point for a SPARC server would be?

http://208.56.182.73/Products___Solutions/Appliances_Overview/R-Series_Main/
r-series_main.html

That's at $20K per TB and quad PIII-1GHz are faster than quad SPARCs, for
the money.

> 40GB also doesn't scale well to 5,000,000 users.

Do you have 5M users?

> So let's say we double our user's boxes from 10MB to 20MB.
> 
> 10MB X 5,000,000 = 50TB (assuming only one mail box per 
> customer, more like
> two plus in the real world so you might consider trebling the 
> following
> figures in the real world)
> 
> 50TB/40GB = 1,250 HDD X $99 = $123,750 (at your PC price) plus the not
> inconsiderable cost of the servers/raids to hold them and staff to
> administer/maintain them. My WAG (wild ass guess) would place the true
> multiple E-mail box/user cost at about $1/customer/month; 
> close to, if not
> more than, most ISP's profit margin. (Profit, what profit?) 

Let's take your user figures and the RAIDZONE prices;

50TB x $20K = $1M
$1M / 5M = $0.20 (20 cents per user, or 2 cents per MB)

If you can't make "keystone" then that's a clear indication that your market
will not support the service.

> Now if we can just get the marketing folk to do a study to see if our
> customers would be willing to pay that additional $1/month to 
> fund this in a market where more and more providers are offer additional
"free" mail
> boxes...

Many of those "free" email boxen are underwritten by advertising revenue. In
case you hadn't noticed, that market is collapsing. Others are bundeling
that service with other services. Incremental cost factors still contribute
to COGs and COGs should be no mkore than 60% of retail price, or you
shouldn't be offering the service. No wonder many ISPs are going under.