Megaupload had a lot of assets that were frozen. I don’t know about the legailities, but it would be reasonable to use frozen funds to pay for this.
Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day
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Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day
#12I can definitely understand the lost potential revenue of having unused servers. But I wonder why they are saying that cost includes power and connectivity for the servers? Seems like they would be powered down. I would actually have assumed the servers to be confiscated and taken off-premise by the FBI.
Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day
#13Its the storage disks the government need, not the rest of the server hardware, if they cant come up with an agreement then shutdown all the servers, take out the disks, catalog, and put in a warehouse somewhere. They are now free to re-use the rest of the server for something else.
That would satisfy the needs of the government if they need access to the data, preserve it if in the future people are allowed to download it, and prevent the MPAA from complaining that it was given back to Megaupload.
I'm sure the cost of storage would not be minimal, but they could still use the rest of the hardware and not have to keep the servers powered up.
Possible problems:
- Maybe the servers cant be shutdown and brought back up without certain passwords or encryption keys
- Labor cost of shutting down and catalogging all those disks ( if done progressively would probably work )
- Others?
Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day
#14I can definitely understand the lost potential revenue of having unused servers. But I wonder why they are saying that cost includes power and connectivity for the servers? Seems like they would be powered down. I would actually have assumed the servers to be confiscated and taken off-premise by the FBI.
It's possible (though I'd doubt it is the case) that those servers have data from other clients as well.
Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day
#15Pardon my ignorance, and this is a serious question, but why can't they just turn them off? I realize it doesn't address all the costs, but surely it could reduce them significantly.
Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day
#16In my mind, the MPAA is certainly the best choice to pay these costs. They're the ones with the problem, they should be the ones to bear the burden. Especially considering Megaupload offered to take the data and they explicitly forbade it. If the MPAA didn't like the solutions offered, but can't come up with something better, then I think Carpathia should get to do what it wants. Edit: The opinion above has NO legal…
Technically, I think Carpathia can recover their costs from megaupload, even with the contract being terminated. If megaupload can't pay, then the insurer(s) should step in.
Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day
#17At that price, it would only take them 150 days to stop losing money if they started building some Backblaze servers ( http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v... ). 25,000TB / 135TB * $7,384 = $1,367,407 minimum cost of commercial hardware to store that much. "historically and mind-bogglingly large amount of data" - you could say that again.
Did you read the article at all? They can't lease the equipment to anyone else, which is what's costing them money. The servers were estimated to be values at $1.25M, but they are also unable to lease all the space that they are using, which is significant.
Yes, I get that. That's why I said "stop losing money." It seems like their only solution would be to transfer the images of the data to cold storage and then find some source to recoup the cost of the cold storage devices (which is why I thought the backblaze numbers would be interesting.)
Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day
#18In civil or criminal asset forfeiture, the state can conceivably confiscate property if used for or if it enables a crime. In some jurisdictions it doesn't even matter if the owner of the property and the criminal have really nothing to do with each other. (i.e. Your stolen SUV was used to rob a liquor store.)
Also, the government could have probably seized everything anyway as evidence. The problem with that is setting up that much rack space and network infrastructure isn't cheap.
That's Carpathia's basis for compensation. They are providing a service to the government. Seems like a no-brainer.
Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day
#19It sucks, but that's the price of doing business. They chose their customer, and now are (unfortunately) tied to consequences. Same thing happens to building owners who have a crime committed by a tenant, the leased space becomes a crime scene until the police/govt are done with their investigation.
But instead of just losing use of those servers, they have to actively maintain them. It looks like they just want someone to pay for the $9000 per day that it costs to keep the servers running, they aren't looking for money that they lost from not being able to use the servers.
To go with your analogy, sure building owners aren't allowed to rent the space back out, but they most certainly not asked to pay for usual water, gas, or electricity bills (because they aren't/shouldn't be being used).
Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day
#20For reference, this amount of data would require 190 backblaze storage pods ($7,384 for 135TB) totaling $1.4 million.
Is that pre- or post- Thailand flooding prices? (Have drive prices settled down again?) And is there any redundancy included in your figures? (25 petabytes / 135 terabytes == about 190 pods)
Backblaze quoted this price before the flood at $120 for 3TB. I'm not sure if post-flood prices are back to these prices or what range of prices you can expect at this volume.
This figure doesn't include redundancy. Backblaze uses raid6, so the usable capacity is actually 117TB per pod[1]. With this configuration the final cost should be closer to $1.6 million.
[1] http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2341206&cid=36834390