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Ask HN: How would you store 10PB of data for your startup today?

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Re: Ask HN: How would you store 10PB of data for your startup today?

#41
post #29

Here's an unpopular answer - don't store 10PB of data. Find a way for your startup to work without needlessly having to store insane amounts of data that will likely never be needed.

If you can solve that for me without affecting revenue I have $1m in cash for you right there.

We are a photo/video storage service.

Re: Ask HN: How would you store 10PB of data for your startup today?

#42
post #29

Here's an unpopular answer - don't store 10PB of data. Find a way for your startup to work without needlessly having to store insane amounts of data that will likely never be needed.

You could probably put a fun marketing spin on that.

"We use ML to ensure we only store the highest quality data, freeing you from the chains of having too much worthless data and nothing to do with it."

Re: Ask HN: How would you store 10PB of data for your startup today?

#43

It's going to depend entirely on a number of factors. How are you storing this data? Is it tons of small objects, or a smaller number of massive objects? If you can aggregate the small objects into larger ones, can you compress them? Is this 10PB compressed or not? If this is video or photo data, compression won't buy you nearly as much. If you have to access small bits of data, and this data isn't something like Par…

Great question. I updated the original post. It’s user generated images and videos. We download those to the phones in the background.

We don’t touch the data at all.

Re: Ask HN: How would you store 10PB of data for your startup today?

#45

Are you fundamentally a data storage business or are you another business that happens to store a tremendous amount of data? If it's the former, then investing in-house might make sense (a la Dropbox's reverse course).

He's the CTO of KeepSafe.

Ok, so it seems that they are indeed a data storage company.

Re: Ask HN: How would you store 10PB of data for your startup today?

#46
post #29

Here's an unpopular answer - don't store 10PB of data. Find a way for your startup to work without needlessly having to store insane amounts of data that will likely never be needed.

Excellent advice for a data backup startup.

Doesn't this imply that they started a company without actually having a plan for the most fundamental part of what they are selling?

This is like an ISP asking how they can get hooked up to the internet.

Re: Ask HN: How would you store 10PB of data for your startup today?

#47
10PB is a crazy amount of data. Far more than any normal business would ever have to deal with. Presuming you aren't crazy, you must have an unusual business plan to legitimately need to handle that much data. That means it's tough for us to say much - any assumptions we might have about it could be invalid depending on your actual business needs. You're just going to have to tell us some more about your business case before we can say anything useful about it.

Re: Ask HN: How would you store 10PB of data for your startup today?

#48
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the data scientists rarely have the foresight to know what the data scientists need the information for. The only time I've seen a data scientist correctly include all the data they needed (but still be wrong) was when they answered "All of it. We need all of the data".

So true. Tough to know in advance which data will hold the secrets.

And you can't build a time machine to go and get it once you do know. Want X days of historical data for training/backtesting and we just implemented the metric this sprint? Good luck meeting your deadline!

Re: Ask HN: How would you store 10PB of data for your startup today?

#49
post #42
post #29

Here's an unpopular answer - don't store 10PB of data. Find a way for your startup to work without needlessly having to store insane amounts of data that will likely never be needed.

You could probably put a fun marketing spin on that. "We use ML to ensure we only store the highest quality data, freeing you from the chains of having too much worthless data and nothing to do with it."

GPT-3 that convinces you why you don't need to store this thing

Re: Ask HN: How would you store 10PB of data for your startup today?

#50

Backblaze B2, ingress and egress are free through Cloudflare, and it's S3 compatible. It's peanuts by comparison but I've been storing ~22TB on there for years and love it. Wasabi and Glacier would be my 2nd choices.

I’ve looked at them. Would love to talk to you about your usage and experience with them.
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