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Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com

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Re: Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

#51

Post by berberous »

moe wrote: post #36

This is a nail in the coffin of the SaaS backup industry (Backblaze, RescuePlan, etc.). With storage becoming essentially free the last excuse for not using self-hosted, secure backup tools like Arq[1] disappears. [1] http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

I'm considering switching from Backblaze to Arq to backup personal files (photos, etc.) from my rMBP. Anybody have any experience doing this and can recommend one vs. the other? I have a 500GB drive, probably only 300GB to backup. Backblaze is only $5/month, and let's you encrypt, so I'm wondering if it's even worth switching.

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

#52

Post by keysheath »

omh wrote: post #42
fuzzythinker wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless Glacier just changed their pricing, how is it cheaper and simpler? Glacier is also $.01/GB storage, but only $.09/GB retrieval, which is cheaper than google's $.12/GB. Glacier also comes with 1st GB retrieval free/mo.

Glacier have additional fees depending on how fast you retrieve the data. Honestly I'm not sure what they are because I've never had to use it, but my impression is that these fees could be quite high.

At least with Glacier I get the option of retrieving faster. Nearline is going to take more than 3 DAYS to retrieve my data if I only have 1TB stored (3MB/s).

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

#53

Post by dlisboa »

gaul wrote: post #32

I added GCS nearline to my object storage comparison: http://gaul.org/object-store-comparison/

Just a correction: the city name is Sao Paulo with a 'u'. It has the tilde at São but if you don't want to you can omit it. The thing is that Paolo with an 'o' isn't a Portuguese name (it's Italian). In English it's written like in Portuguese. I see it sometimes so I just got in the habit of reminding people, wasn't calling you out, just trying to prevent future mistakes like that.

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

#54

Post by atYevP »

dragonwriter wrote: post #45
sp332 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backblaze is $5/mo per computer. If I have 4TB on a computer, it's still just $5/mo.

Backblaze can probably afford to be $5/mo per computer because the average computer using it has less than 4TB; OTOH, if there is a more cost effective option for the low end, it won't make sense to use Backblaze on the low end, which will drive up Backblaze's sustainable per computer price.

Yev from Backblaze here -> Fair point! Our costs keep decreasing as well -> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/150-petabytes-of-cloud-storag... and we're able to grow quickly (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect... ), so even if avg. user size goes up, decreasing costs make up for it overall.

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

#55

Post by berberous »

moe wrote: post #46
sp332 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backblaze is $5/mo per computer. If I have 4TB on a computer, it's still just $5/mo.

Well, I would guess the number of people who need to backup 4T is rather small. My thinking is that most people likely max out well below the 0.5T that the same $5 buys you on Google now, making that variant actually cheaper for them than Backblaze. For those people it means paying less per month and getting privacy and better control (data retention!) in return. Should be a no-brainer.

Backblaze lets you add a personal encryption key. I guess they could log that key when you try to decrypt and restore, although I trust they don't. I suppose the NSA probably gets the key when it gets transmitted, but I don't really care. Am I missing something here? If Backblaze's encryption implementation is substantially worse, I may switch.

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

#56

Post by jdsullivan »

Spearchucker wrote: post #40
manacit wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a few reasons: * Dropbox doesn't guarantee 11 9s like this service does - when I'm backing critical data up, I want to make sure it's _there_. * Dropbox likely wouldn't take kindly to me storing 10PB, whereas that is what this service is designed for. * I've got SLAs and guaranteed speeds with this, Dropbox isn't designed for me to suddenly download 10PB very quickly.

12 9s is new to me too. Not worked on anything better than 5 9s (5 mins downtime/year), and Wikipedia only goes to 9. 9 9s comes to 35ms downtime a year . I can't think of anything that needs more than 5 9s, let alone 9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_ca...

This is a durability metric, not an availability one. This typically tells you the likelihood of losing a given object in a year. (5 9's would be quite poor for this, implying a loss of 1 object out of 100,000 every year)

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

#57

Post by throwawaymsft »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #33
manacit wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a few reasons: * Dropbox doesn't guarantee 11 9s like this service does - when I'm backing critical data up, I want to make sure it's _there_. * Dropbox likely wouldn't take kindly to me storing 10PB, whereas that is what this service is designed for. * I've got SLAs and guaranteed speeds with this, Dropbox isn't designed for me to suddenly download 10PB very quickly.

Where are you seeing these durability claims? I can't find them. And what would 12 9s durability even mean? You lose one byte out of every TB?

I'm thinking (unrecoverable data loss / total data stored) in their system per year.

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

#58

Post by manacit »

Spearchucker wrote: post #40
manacit wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a few reasons: * Dropbox doesn't guarantee 11 9s like this service does - when I'm backing critical data up, I want to make sure it's _there_. * Dropbox likely wouldn't take kindly to me storing 10PB, whereas that is what this service is designed for. * I've got SLAs and guaranteed speeds with this, Dropbox isn't designed for me to suddenly download 10PB very quickly.

12 9s is new to me too. Not worked on anything better than 5 9s (5 mins downtime/year), and Wikipedia only goes to 9. 9 9s comes to 35ms downtime a year . I can't think of anything that needs more than 5 9s, let alone 9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_ca...

It was 11, not 12. I misspoke: http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/

In this case, it's not as much service uptime as it is data retention. If you're storing 5+ PB of data, even 5 9s of data loss per year can have a measurable impact.

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

#59

Post by keysheath »

crb wrote: post #2

1c/GB/mo for data stored, ~3 seconds response times (cf. tape/Glacier at multiple hours), 11 9s durability, same API as Google Cloud Storage online. (edit: add /month)

There's no mention of durability numbers anywhere in the docs. S3 and Glacier mention 11 9s durability in their FAQ though.

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

#60

Post by moe »

berberous wrote: post #51
moe wrote: post #36

This is a nail in the coffin of the SaaS backup industry (Backblaze, RescuePlan, etc.). With storage becoming essentially free the last excuse for not using self-hosted, secure backup tools like Arq[1] disappears. [1] http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

I'm considering switching from Backblaze to Arq to backup personal files (photos, etc.) from my rMBP. Anybody have any experience doing this and can recommend one vs. the other? I have a 500GB drive, probably only 300GB to backup. Backblaze is only $5/month, and let's you encrypt, so I'm wondering if it's even worth switching.

I'm using Arq with DreamObjects currently (hope Google support will be added soon), backing up two laptops and a desktop, total backup size ~3T.

I can hardly recommend it high enough.

The only minor niggles that I've run into were:

- If you have a very large directory (hundreds of thousands of files) then opening the backup-catalog can give you the beachball for minutes. However this really only happens for ginormous directories and is easily resolved by splitting the job into a few smaller ones.

- If you're low on diskspace then the temp files that Arq creates during a backup can drive you over the edge and into a disk-full situation.

Other than that it has been rock-solid for me, the author really knows what he's doing.

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