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Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

blog.sia.tech

71–80 of 353 posts

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#71
Interesting article, but "black swan situations like world war three" may be underestimation. Software bugs are more likely and sometimes fatal.

I wonder why transfer prices are not included? As you explain every transfer is paid does it mean one has to pay for 10 uploads of every single object, right? But as equipment ages, peers go out of business then who pays for the data rebalancing transfers?

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#73
post #32

Top of Hacker News and there's nothing clickable above the fold that takes me to the SIA website. Content marketers and technical marketers - don't miss the opportunity on Medium and other platforms to at VERY LEAST link to your homepage in the first section. In fact that is at the top of this awesome piece of content marketing is a "Sign Up" button for Medium . . .

I ended up at https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia and there's no activity in the last two years, the latest issues are a few "you broke my wallet with the update and my password doesn't work" from 2018.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#74
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The third sentence of your Medium article says; "Despite this, the Sia network is able to achieve 99.9999% uptime for files." How do you achieve this in a "not a highly reliable facility"?

Redundancy, I assume. Lots of unreliable facilities and nodes can be very durable in aggregate.

[deleted]

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#75
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backblaze has tried to make their datacenter as efficient as possible, and still only ends up hitting $5/tb/mo for their b2 service, as a point of reference.

Backblaze is very good but they are definitely not efficient in $$ utilization. Efficient $$ utilization is bread racks, built out data centers abandoned by the likes of PepBoys that landlords will part for $3/sq foot per year and Google using servers without cases and velcros to keep hard drives attached.

Abandoned pepboys stores don't usually have very good fiber connectivity. Backblaze and similar hosting/storage companies move enough traffic that they need to be topologically close to major IX points.

If all you want is cheap commercial real estate with cheap dollars per square foot figures, there are plenty of economically depressed areas within the United States that you could put things. Those areas usually have very poor fibre connectivity, fibre diversity, and choice of carriers.

I have previously explained this to a number of people who asked me, basically, why don't all of these gigantic abandoned shopping malls get converted into Data center space? Two reasons: poor connectivity, and nowhere near enough electrical grid feed capacity (as proper three phase service) in terms of watts per square foot. Bulldozing empty land in Quincy and putting up a tilt-up concrete on slab dedicated purpose datacenter structure is much less costly than extensively retrofitting abandoned, 30, 40, 50 year old commercial real estate.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#76
post #27

How did they go from 8 SATA ports to 32 SATA devices? The linked cable uses a SAS host/connector. Was a SAS card left out of the parts list?

Using "8x 4 way SATA data splitters". What i don't get is why they don't use 14TB HDDs, they are only 15% more expensive per TB. On the other hand they'd need 2.33x less PCs at $550 each, plus their power use. So instead of every 7 PCs with 6TB HDDs they'd need 3 with 14TB HDDs. PS: They could also use a mainboard with 10 SATA ports instead of 8. They are only $15 more than the chosen board. Adding one or more PCIe 8…

6TB might be the most reliable at the time the decision was made.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#77
Wait, how are they connecting 32 drives to that motherboard? They seem to be implying they are splitting each SATA plug 4 ways, which as far as I know is impossible.

The adapter they're linking to is SF8087 to 4x SATA, not SATA to 4x SATA (which shouldn't exist). That motherboard doesn't have SF8087, it has 8 SATA3 connections.

Unless I've missed something big, SF8087 can not be plugged into SATA3.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#78
post #14

> That means about 2 hours of labor per rig. We’ll call that $50 Does that seem low to anyone else? I don’t really have any background in the area, but 25/hr cost to the company would be less than 20/hr pay for the skilled labor. Other countries are different of course, but in US I could make that much flipping burgers in the right area.

I don't think they mean engineer time here - it's assembling the servers, so technicians, and yeah I guess yeah like most people they aren't paid like in-demand software engineers. This is how most people have to get to by!

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#79
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. A lot of these numbers are drawn from experience in the mining world, where people realized that when cost is the ultimate bottom line, a lot of corners can be cut. Sia systems don't need a ton of networking. I ran the networking buildout costs by some networking people, and again it comes down to cutting corners. If you only need 10 gbps per rack, if you don't mind having extra milliseconds added, etc,…

Here's the issue. We know that due to economy of scale and domain experience, AWS will always have the lowest cost (to Amazon) for storage -- whether that's totally-reliable storage, or sorta-reliable. If there was a demand for sorta-reliable, they'd build a sorta-reliable S3 and undercut you. Then, blockchain adds inefficiency. Therefore, it's basically impossible for any blockchain solution to have a lower total co…

Everybody with more money than you can always undercut you in anything you ever do so why bother ever trying to do anything

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#80
post #36
post #15

I worked on the design of Dropbox's exabyte-scale storage system, and from that experience I can say that these numbers are all extremely optimistic, even with their "you can do it cheaper if you only target 95% uptime" caveat. Networking is much more expensive, labor is much more expensive, space is much more expensive, depreciation is faster than they say, etc etc. I don't think the authors have ever done any actua…

Author here. A lot of these numbers are drawn from experience in the mining world, where people realized that when cost is the ultimate bottom line, a lot of corners can be cut. Sia systems don't need a ton of networking. I ran the networking buildout costs by some networking people, and again it comes down to cutting corners. If you only need 10 gbps per rack, if you don't mind having extra milliseconds added, etc,…

Sure, let's dig into networking. Who pays for rereplication traffic? If you do 64-of-96 RS encoding, that means for every failure you need to transfer 64x the lost storage capacity. If you're targeting a "low individual uptime but high aggregate uptime" model this means you need to be storing data in multiple sites -- and dedicated cross-geo bandwidth is expensive. I agree that in the happy case you can use low-bandwidth cheap equipment, but to get good reliability you need to provision for larger clustered failures such as rack- and row-level outages.
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