Been there, done that, at all levels. I would much rather be working on a 10PB set of hardware racks, including all the drive replacements. When you factor in the costs of compute hardware (to make that useful), networking equipment, etc, it's trebled again the cost, and then again for the power, cooling, and cage space to run it all. The actual break-even point of running your own hardware is more like 2 years.
But it's not about price: It's about control, and it's about the expertise you gain from running all of that. If you have 10PB of data, you should have someone in-house who knows how to work with 10PB of data at a low level, and the best way to get that is to employ people at all levels to make that work. You gain significant advantage from having the direct performance data and the expertise of having techs whose 9-5 is replacing disks.
But it's not about price: It's about control, and it's about the expertise you gain from running all of that. If you have 10PB of data, you should have someone in-house who knows how to work with 10PB of data at a low level, and the best way to get that is to employ people at all levels to make that work. You gain significant advantage from having the direct performance data and the expertise of having techs whose 9-5 is replacing disks.