"The first challenge in putting together the big box was getting internal SAS connectors properly seated into the backplane adaptor sockets"
Excuse me?
As a customer I'd feel slightly uncomfortable about my data by now. You make it sound like stuffing 24 disks into a box is rocket science to you, all the while SuperMicro and others sell plug&play chassis for up to 45 disks[1].
Also, you didn't mention it in the post, but you do have at least two of these in two physically distant racks, right?
[edit: deleted snarky comment about people running windows on a fileserver]
At least for this website it isn't your data but it is their data.
They are backing up their curated photos (which seems to pretty much be the whole business as they say in the article).
It appears they are using Akamai services to server their images so hopefully their is some extra redundancy there already.
Other than that it seems like it would be a steal to use s3 as a backup system at this point because from this article it looks like they need to hire another employee to tell them why this backup solution seems a bit silly (I mean having trouble setting up the hardware).
Excuse me?
As a customer I'd feel slightly uncomfortable about my data by now. You make it sound like stuffing 24 disks into a box is rocket science to you, all the while SuperMicro and others sell plug&play chassis for up to 45 disks[1].
Also, you didn't mention it in the post, but you do have at least two of these in two physically distant racks, right?
[edit: deleted snarky comment about people running windows on a fileserver]
[1] http://www.supermicro.com/storage/