Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day • Hacker News Board

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#21

Post by nextstep » Thu, Mar 22, 2012, 8:20 PM UTC

Making Megaupload pay this $9000/day seems unfair, too. The US government has cut off all of Megaupload's revenue streams, and so they would be forcing Megaupload to keep paying for a service that they can no longer make money from.

Regardless, why is the cost so high if the server is down? Does this $9000/day reflect the loss that Carpathia suffers from not re-allocating this storage to other customers? It would seem to me that given Megaupload's current state, it would be sufficient to leave the servers powered down and unplugged until the legal dispute is resolved... surely the cost of leaving a server idle is not $9000. I don't really know though...

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#22

Post by jlawer » Thu, Mar 22, 2012, 8:20 PM UTC

The costs of moving that amount of data is crazy. I am surprised the government hasn't seized the hardware, and chucked it in a warehouse.

I did some back of an envelope calculations... and its absolutely crazy. Tape would require over 17,000 Ultrium tapes. Now you could De-dupe... but the hardware to process and dedupe that much data.... not really an option. Not to mention the time to write that many tapes...

Something like thumpers (48 disk sun x86 boxes) would be expensive, last time I looked they were around say $30k for a large order... 160tb usable assuming 4tb disks are the thumper is split into 4 Raid 6 arrays... thats 160 thumpers... 4.8 Million

Even backblaze pods would likely be well over a Million...

This doesn't even cover hosting costs, transfer and such. Not to mention to be usable in court there are going to have to be processes in place to document compliance and validity of the copy....

All in all not a great place for Carpathia to be in.

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#23

Post by JoeAltmaier » Thu, Mar 22, 2012, 8:22 PM UTC

aqme28 wrote: post #14

jakejake wrote: post #12

I 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.

Any large datacenter has storage allocated in complex ways. IT may be challenging to isolate one customer's data physically from another. For instance, physical disks can be virtually concatenated then repartitioned into virtual storage containers, which may reside on part of 1, or parts of many physical disks.

They could of course migrate all of the contested data onto new storage. But its large; who would pay for that?

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#24

Post by sukuriant » Thu, Mar 22, 2012, 8:23 PM UTC

bshep wrote: post #13

Its 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 downl…

Some people have legitimate files on MegaUpload. They can no longer access them. Should they be able to get those files back somehow?

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#25

Post by nextparadigms » Thu, Mar 22, 2012, 8:23 PM UTC

This is why the US Government shouldn't have seized the site first, and asked questions later. They should've filed a trial against them, and let them keep hosting the data, and if found guilty, then take it down.

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#26

Post by nextparadigms » Thu, Mar 22, 2012, 8:25 PM UTC

guan wrote: post #11

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.

What if they are not found guilty? Does the Government pay it back from Social Security?

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#27

Post by fruchtose » Thu, Mar 22, 2012, 8:25 PM UTC

dos1 wrote: post #2

In 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…

There's no legal basis for the MPAA to bear the cost of storing the data. The MPAA is not even a party to the proceedings, which, by the way, are criminal and not at all civil.

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#28

Post by bshep » Thu, Mar 22, 2012, 8:26 PM UTC

sukuriant wrote: post #24

bshep wrote: post #13

Its 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 downl…

Some people have legitimate files on MegaUpload. They can no longer access them. Should they be able to get those files back somehow?

People with legitimate file can't access them now anyway, this would not change that. I'm just proposing a way out for Carpathia while the case is decided in court.

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#29

Post by frio » Thu, Mar 22, 2012, 8:26 PM UTC

Zikes wrote: post #15

Pardon 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.

While I'm obviously uninvolved, there are several reasons why turning them off might be a hassle. Primarily is that if anything is encrypted, the encryption key is currently in memory and the disks are already open - turning the servers off might require reentering details.

Alternatively, in a setup of this size, I imagine there'd be no end of redundancy configurations - RAID for individual disk sets, DRBD (/a SAN equivalent) across servers - turning them off would turn all that HA tech off. Meaning that, when you try to bring the system back up, the redundancy implementation might say "oh no, I've lost x peers from my set of n" and fail itself completely.

Shrug. I've no doubt explained it badly, but there are good reasons to keep them running. It's not just a case of "pop the hard drive out and use it elsewhere"; the logic associated with keeping 25 petabytes of data would also have to be restored to its current state.

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#30

Post by firefoxman1 » Thu, Mar 22, 2012, 8:27 PM UTC

I know any legitimate hosting company would never do this, but it would be amazing if they just "happened" to have very loose security on the servers that hold Megaupload's data, and if some hacker were to..."gain unauthorized access" and wipe all the data.

They wouldn't be held responsible for a breakin, would they?