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Glacier redux

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Re: Glacier redux

#21

Post by dsr_ »

eli wrote: post #14
michaelt wrote: post #10

But NONE of the Hacker News commenters addressed Sony and Panasonic’s continued investment in high-density optical disc technology. [...] There has to be a business reason for the continued investment, i.e. customers prepared to buy a lot of product in the future and buying a lot right now. If Amazon was the only customer for high-density optical storage, they'd be crazy to invest in developing it, because Amazon wil…

Is it really that unusual to have two vendors competing for a single very large customer?

If the customer is a major government, no. Otherwise? Yes.

Re: Glacier redux

#22

Post by thatthatis »

timfrietas wrote: post #18

Glacier is significantly cheaper than S3 Yes, as long as you put something in and almost never take it out. They charge for deletions in the first 3 months What if this is just disincentive to pull content out and treat Glacier like S3? Power is not the driving cost for Internet scale infrastructure It is not the only cost, but it is still one of the largest factors, no? Sony and Panasonic continue to invest in a pro…

Is there another example of amazon doing discentive pricing?

Every example of their pricing I've seen has been cost plus, cost plus, and/or cost plus.

Thus it seems at least an order of magnitude more likely that the $.03 reflects some cost.

Re: Glacier redux

#23

Post by batbomb »

Okay, this is beyond silly. Still ignoring tape.

Explain how BDXL, a new format, which has never proved itself beyond a few years, which costs $45 for a few hundred GB, which AFAIK has very little data on re-writability (which is probably terrible and close to one-time use) could be any more profitable or reliable, or useful than tape.

I don't buy it. Tape would be the logical short-term choice to get started, because Amazon could just go buy an off-the-shelf tape library and add tape as they needed from Oracle, versus again, engineering their own BDXL library on the expectation that it would cost less than tape, taking into account factors such as:

1. Reliability and degradation 2. Supply 3. Cost 4. Reusability/Re-Writability

Re: Glacier redux

#24

Post by dmourati »

batbomb wrote: post #23

Okay, this is beyond silly. Still ignoring tape. Explain how BDXL, a new format, which has never proved itself beyond a few years, which costs $45 for a few hundred GB, which AFAIK has very little data on re-writability (which is probably terrible and close to one-time use) could be any more profitable or reliable, or useful than tape. I don't buy it. Tape would be the logical short-term choice to get started, becaus…

Not tape.

http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-launches-glacier-cloud-storage-h...

Re: Glacier redux

#26

Post by asn0 »

enricotal wrote: post #13

The Amazon Glacier Secret is hidden in plan sight. I think is just a virtual product. Probably unused S3 capacity, at a much lower price, not a different technology.

Maybe Glacier stores in the unused parts of S3 disk sectors, the empty part of the last sector of files that don't completely fill 512k. Takes 4-5 hours to retrieve because it has to pull without impacting dozens or hundreds of S3 drives.

Re: Glacier redux

#27

Post by timfrietas »

thatthatis wrote: post #22
timfrietas wrote: post #18

Glacier is significantly cheaper than S3 Yes, as long as you put something in and almost never take it out. They charge for deletions in the first 3 months What if this is just disincentive to pull content out and treat Glacier like S3? Power is not the driving cost for Internet scale infrastructure It is not the only cost, but it is still one of the largest factors, no? Sony and Panasonic continue to invest in a pro…

Is there another example of amazon doing discentive pricing? Every example of their pricing I've seen has been cost plus, cost plus, and/or cost plus. Thus it seems at least an order of magnitude more likely that the $.03 reflects some cost.

Fulfilled by Amazon has disincentives for heavy/large objects, pulling inventory back to mail it back to you and for not prepping your item correctly when shipping it in.

Re: Glacier redux

#29

Post by batbomb »

dmourati wrote: post #24
batbomb wrote: post #23

Okay, this is beyond silly. Still ignoring tape. Explain how BDXL, a new format, which has never proved itself beyond a few years, which costs $45 for a few hundred GB, which AFAIK has very little data on re-writability (which is probably terrible and close to one-time use) could be any more profitable or reliable, or useful than tape. I don't buy it. Tape would be the logical short-term choice to get started, becaus…

Not tape. http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-launches-glacier-cloud-storage-h...

No, it doesn't definitively say the backing storage is not tape based. Only that:

    "Essentially you can see this as a replacement for tape,"
and:

    "inexpensive commodity hardware components"
Nowhere did they explicitly deny that it may be tape-backed.

In addition, From the article:

     Instead, Glacier runs on "inexpensive commodity hardware components", he said, noting that the service is designed to be hardware-agnostic.
Which may allude to the fact that the backing storage itself may be flexible (a combination of HDD, Tape, possible BDXL)

The author himself only acknowledges:

    This suggests the system will be based on very large storage arrays consisting of a multitude of high-capacity low-cost discs.
Which isn't definitive in the slightest. Also, the article is over 18 months old.

I've said it before, I wouldn't be terrible surprised if they got started with old commodity hardware to get started, but the economics and characteristics of tape still seem much more amenable to the use case.

Re: Glacier redux

#30

Post by klodolph »

vilpponen wrote: post #8

Full disclosure: I work at UpCloud, a cloud hosting provider and I think business in this industry day and night. One thing that gets overlooked in almost all comparisons is the pricing models. I actually use Glacier through Arq (brilliant backup for Mac), but the catch is in the requests. I recently uploaded 200GB of photos to glacier and the upload process cost me about $10. The monthly storage is about $2. The thi…

$10 for upload? Pricing is $0.050 per UPLOAD request plus $0.000 per byte. That means that your backup system made 200,000 UPLOAD requests. I don't think I have that many files which I want to back up, and I would hope that any system using Glacier as a back-end would bundle smaller files into larger archives.

(Well, I guess it means that your request size averaged 1 MB. If I'm already using Glacier, I would be perfectly happy with archive granularity coarser than 1 MB.)

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