Turn a 100-Petabyte Storage Allocation into a Revenue-Generating Product

Your company gives you 100 petabytes (PB) of storage capacity and asks you to build a product on it that makes money. Explain what you would build, who would pay for it and why, how you would price and launch it, and how you would know it is working. ```hint Price the raw bytes first Work out roughly what the capacity would earn if you simply rented it out as plain storage. That baseline tells you how much more each byte has to be worth in whatever product you propose. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Is 100 PB the raw disk capacity or the usable space after redundancy, and is it in one data center or spread across regions? - Is the capacity ours to keep for years, or spare headroom the company might reclaim later? - Does the company already sell storage or cloud services that this product should build on or avoid competing with? - Do compute and network bandwidth come with the storage, or only the disks? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - Sizing the asset: usable capacity, what it would earn as plain storage, and how many customers or how much data of different kinds it can hold. - Candidate products compared on value per byte, fit with a fixed pool of capacity, differentiation and cost to serve, ending in a reasoned choice. - A target customer and their problem, with a first version, pricing and a route to market. - Unit economics, success metrics with guardrails, and risks such as data loss, the capacity running out or being reclaimed, and competition from cloud providers. ### Follow-up Questions - Your product starts filling the capacity much faster than planned. What do you do, and what does that tell you about your pricing? - Why would a customer buy from you instead of renting the same space from a large cloud provider? - Leadership wants meaningful revenue this year rather than a multi-year bet. Does your choice change?