Save more with Google Drive • Hacker News Board

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#411

Post by dennisgorelik » Mon, Mar 17, 2014, 11:41 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #410

dennisgorelik wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Checkout had subscriptions. Google Wallet does not have subscriptions.

Yes it does. https://developers.google.com/wallet/digital/docs/subscripti...

Ok, it looks like subscriptions. Though it does not allow me to charge my customers who subscribed for Google Checkout. And it's definitely not the same API as Google Checkout.

None of my customers missed Google Checkout. I got burned by losing subscriptions due to Google Checkout retirement.

I'm not going to touch Google Wallet.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#412

Post by daave » Tue, Mar 18, 2014, 2:26 AM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #90

And still making an easy profit. Calculating it through, I think they make about $5 profit per terabyte per year, and that's using normal prices that I'd pay for hardware and power as a consumer in America.* That is considering costs for: buying drives (with a mean time to failure of 2 years), buying a server, power for the server and drives, and storing the data with 3x redundancy (two drives can fail and a third an…

3x redundancy is very cost ineffective. See this 2010 Google presentation (slide 13) on the 'Colossus' File System, which uses Reed-Solomon encodings.

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...

There's really a need for a good open-source equivalent to Colossus, which would allow startups like the hypothetical one you describe to do storage must more cheaply and reliably. HDFS (with HDSF-RAID) is probably the closest.. but it's still a long way off.

I'd be interested in what other assumptions you're using to come up with the $5/T profit margin. Are you considering the cost of ingress and egress bandwidth, cooling, personnel to enact repairs? With a large enough fleet you'll have many drives/machines die every day. What about a team of engineers in an on-call rotation to keep to respond when (inevitable) failures occur? Just pointing out that drives + power is only part of the total cost of running such a service.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#413

Post by daave » Tue, Mar 18, 2014, 2:32 AM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #295

jliptzin wrote: post #203

If nothing else this just exposes how high Dropbox's margins must be.

Dropbox is based on Amazon S3 which at their cheapest advertised rate costs 4x more than than what Google is offering. (although with Dropbox's usage they can probably get a volume discount) I wonder if Dropbox have plans to start utilizing their own data center to get costs down...

> I wonder if Dropbox have plans to start utilizing their own data center to get costs down...

Mid last year a recruiter from Dropbox told me they were looking into this, and wanted to make it happen in 2014.