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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

#61

Post by ma2rten »

samstave wrote: post #49
DanBC wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Assuming 2TB internal HDD's at $120.00 per piece, you would need $1.5MM worth of drives to transfer this to. Not including the man-hours associated with doing so. The $3.2MM per year is actually sounding a lot more reasonable to keep it up and running.

Wow, I bother to calculate it. However,

- if you buy HDDs in these quantities you will get a big discount (50%+)

- they most likely get the HDDs back after the case is finished, but not the electricity bill.

- you have to factor in opportunity costs from not being able to rent out that rackspace.

- I don't even understand how this can be proper evidence if it just hangs around at a private company.

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

#62

Post by tedunangst »

DanBC wrote: post #40
ma2rten wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You can get insurance for "my client shafted me but I've still got bills to pay" but more typically I think you ask the client to post bond. It's called knowing your client. An ISP doing this much business with one client but not considering the possibility of MU going under is irresponsible.

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

#63

Post by jonknee »

ecaron wrote: post #17
jonknee wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I doubt they are legally allowed to do that. Otherwise it would be a simple matter of a lot of tape drives.

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

#64

Post by gee_totes »

adrianpike wrote: post #10

Can someone more familiar with this stuff explain why Carpathia's still paying for "power and connectivity"? I would have assumed that the FBI would have actually seized the servers, or at the very least pulled the network cables out.

Not if the evidence is on the servers.

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

#65

Post by Karunamon »

georgemcbay wrote: post #59
gwern wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe it or not, there are even people who don't have backups at all. I know, right?

Not backing up your important data is passive stupidity. Backing up your data on Megaupload and then not keeping a local copy is active stupidity of such vast scale that I refuse to believe it has ever happened in the real world.

>Backing up your data on Megaupload and then not keeping a local copy is active stupidity of such vast scale that I refuse to believe it has ever happened in the real world.

To borrow a famous quote.. nobody ever went broke overestimating the intelligence of the public.

That said, having your backup service raided by LEO's toadying about for entertainment conglomerates was probably not even on the list of people's possible downtime concerns..

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

#66

Post by Karunamon »

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…

>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.

Forgive me for for sounding like a member of Anonymous but..

So? That's the government's problem. I don't see why a private company should be in any position where they're required (at wallet or gun point) to help in an investigation at their own expense. Pull the drives, warehouse them, and let the FBI do what they have to do. They have IT to rebuild the RAIDs.

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

#67

Post by deadmike »

rmc wrote: post #50
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…

Why are the servers still running? Surely it's easier and cheaper to just turn off the servers, power down the racks and lock the cages?

I'm wondering this, too. The data would still be there, and they wouldn't have to worry about maintenance costs at least, right?

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

#68

Post by mmaunder »

This gives an idea of the economic activity generated by services like megaupload and what is being removed from the economy by killing the company. Roughly $3.2 million in hosting fees, and could be more if that's just the cost price. Also salaries, over $1 million in hardware, and the various other suppliers. One wonders about the GDP of the recording and movie industries relative to the businesses they're going after.

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

#69

Post by zevyoura »

jneal wrote: post #46

What's the big deal? Just delete the data. Customer pays for storage. Company stores. Customer stops paying for storage. Company deletes. Sure, a bunch of pissed off people will certainly be upset - but it's not the company's fault - they shouldn't have to bear this burden. I can't see how they could be sued by users for this, they didn't enter into any kind of agreement with the users, only with the customer.

The article also mentions that they need to hold onto the data because it may be used as evidence in the court case.

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

#70

Post by VikingCoder »

Help me out with the math here:

1 terabyte costs them $128.41 per year, right?

Amazon S3 would cost them roughly $444 per year, if they were using the Reduced Redundancy Storage.

The cheapest HD that I see on pcpartpicker (in terms of Price/GB) is the Western Digital Caviar Green 2.5 TB (5400 RPM) for $135.43, which is $0.054/GB. That's $54.17 per TB.

If you want a single backup, that's $108.34 per TB. Two backups (3 copies of each file), is $162.51 per TB.

So, if I'm doing this right, as long as their HDs last at least 15 months, on average, they have triple-redundancy, and the cheapest price ratio for consumer hardware. And I'm not even counting their power, network, cooling, or puny humans to maintain it all. That means their HDs, if they were made out of the cheapest parts I could find, would have to last significantly longer than 15 months, on average.

They're actually doing really good on price, if you ask me.

Or am I missing something obvious, or doing the math horribly wrong?

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