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

arstechnica.com

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

#31

Post by ajross »

anon808 wrote: post #6

It 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.

I hate to say it, because I'm as sympathetic to this ISP as anyone else. But this is what insurance is for. Big single customers are risks. Surely someone out there would have been willing to write a policy to cover unforseeable things like this.

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

#32

Post by jlawer »

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…

You want to pull 1,103 server's disks?

The compatibility problems you have trying to get data off a disks in a hardware raid make it impractical (do you have the EXACT SAME version hardware revision & firmware; without this you can't guarantee you can read it back)? Its either that or you have to pay data recovery guys to rebuild it.

Not to mention hard drive costs are still high, post thai floods. For enterprise gear we are getting most quotes ~ $300 AUD a disk, for consumer gear its ~ $130. Most servers are running at least 2 disks... that $286K worth of disks alone if your talking cheap - low capacity disks, not including labour to change the disks and test the hardware before you deploy a workload to it.

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

#33

Post by SoftwareMaven »

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.

I really doubt that would be legal. It would be akin to the government can forcing you to pay for them to prosecute you.

Of course, I think the whole category of forfeiture law it blatantly contrary to the Fourth Ammendment, so what do I know.

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

#34

Post by DanBC »

I'm really confused by this. Is Megaupload (or any megaupload employee) facing a criminal trial? How can any "evidence trial" (or whatever they call it) be maintained if a law-enforcement agency doesn't have the drives?

Have any hashes been taken of the drives?

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

#35

Post by stfu »

citricsquid wrote: post #7
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…

The data is being held (from what I understand) as part of an FBI investigation. The MPAA may be responsible for the case existing and bringing the supposed crime to light but the FBI are the people trying the case and this is beyond the MPAA now. The responsibility lies with the government agencies.

The FBI, as MPAA's minions, should be the ones paying it. Either their "confiscate" the data or they do not. If they do, they have the responsibility to keep it up, if they do not, they should have to give it back to its "owner".

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

#37

Post by unseen »

This seems like a very obvious case. If the government wants the data, it needs to come and copy it, possibly seize the hard drives, or if it doesn't want to do any of that but still access the data, it needs to pay the bills.

I don't think the EFFs claim here is actually of any legal merit. You have no legal right to access data you sent to a third-party at at any time, why would you even think that? Theres no "lex cloud" yet.

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

#38

Post by bshep »

jlawer wrote: post #32
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…

You want to pull 1,103 server's disks? The compatibility problems you have trying to get data off a disks in a hardware raid make it impractical (do you have the EXACT SAME version hardware revision & firmware; without this you can't guarantee you can read it back)? Its either that or you have to pay data recovery guys to rebuild it. Not to mention hard drive costs are still high, post thai floods. For enterprise gea…

Well as I said the could do it piecemeal (10 servers at a time or what have you) and it would require that the data (harware/versions/etc) for the source machine be archived with the disks. (good cataloguing)

Also $286K / $9k / day ~= 32 days, so in 32 days it costs them more to keep it all running that simply replace the disks.

Not to mention they could now lease those servers to another client and make money off of them.

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

#39

Post by ma2rten »

xymostech wrote: post #19
anon808 wrote: post #6

It 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…

I don't understand why this is the case, why can't they exchange the HDDs in the servers, tell the FBI to come with a big van and store the HDDs with the evidence on it themselves in some evidence room?

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

#40

Post by DanBC »

ma2rten wrote: post #39
xymostech wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't understand why this is the case, why can't they exchange the HDDs in the servers, tell the FBI to come with a big van and store the HDDs with the evidence on it themselves in some evidence room?

25 petabytes of hard disc is a considerable cost.

Some people have mentioned insurance. Would any policy cover you for a customer being investigated for possibly criminal activity?

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