C14, the Secure Cold Storage Platform, for Free During the Summer • Hacker News Board

Re: C14, the Secure Cold Storage Platform, for Free During the Summer

#11

Post by belorn » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 1:38 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #2

It seems really cheap, do you think it's sustainable at those prices?

From the perspective of sustainable, I can find retail harddrives for about €0.023 per GB (not counting taxes). This site take €0.002 per month, so with a very simplistic view, a harddrive is producing profits after about a year. There is of course many additional costs, and they could also be getting a better deal than current retail prices, but from a pure question of "X+1 customer mean a gain or a loss", I would lean towards sustainable.

Re: C14, the Secure Cold Storage Platform, for Free During the Summer

#12

Post by edouardb » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 1:45 PM UTC

boulos wrote: post #9

abermingham wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, multi-location will be proposed in September, you will be able to choose each location where you want your archive. The 40TB limit came from the temporary storage plateform who need to be fully provisioned for each active archives. This temporary storage is free of charge, we had to put some limitations to keep reasonable plateform. https://blog.online.net/content/images/2016/07/c14howitworks... The backend stor…

Good to know. So what facility are you in currently? And how much bandwidth do you have? (i.e., if I want to get 25 TB out for recovery, how long will that take in the best case?)

Online DC2, Paris, France http://www.iliad-datacenter.fr/datacenters/dc2 (French)

Re: C14, the Secure Cold Storage Platform, for Free During the Summer

#13

Post by tluyben2 » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 1:48 PM UTC

I have to register my debit/credit card and it refuses with "Error" :) I asked support but that's not a very good start.

Re: C14, the Secure Cold Storage Platform, for Free During the Summer

#14

Post by rsync » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 2:39 PM UTC

boulos wrote: post #3

From their FAQ: > Where is my data stored? > Your data will be stored in our fallout shelter, located 25 meters under the ground in Paris, France, starting in September 2016. So where is it for now? And like Backblaze, a single site storage solution means you should only consider this as an extra backup (not primary storage). There's a note that in September they'll also be expanding to offer multisite, but don't hav…

"I can't imagine an S3/GCS bucket restriction like that, so I'm curious how customers will be expected to work around it."

Amazon S3 has a 5TB object size limit and only 5GB (!) can be uploaded in a single PUT[1]. Different limits, but still something people have to work around.

An actual filesystem on ZFS makes all of these limits disappear. Does anyone offer cloud storage based on that ?

Man, that would be awesome.

[1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/UploadingObje...

Re: C14, the Secure Cold Storage Platform, for Free During the Summer

#15

Post by balamaci » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 2:44 PM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #13

I have to register my debit/credit card and it refuses with "Error" :) I asked support but that's not a very good start.

Same for me. I wanted to use them two weeks ago but could not get passed it. I just gave up on 3rd card attempt. And btw why can't they support pay-pall? It always makes me uneasy to pass in the credit card details directly on a site.

Re: C14, the Secure Cold Storage Platform, for Free During the Summer

#16

Post by tluyben2 » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 3:03 PM UTC

balamaci wrote: post #15

tluyben2 wrote: post #13

I have to register my debit/credit card and it refuses with "Error" :) I asked support but that's not a very good start.

Same for me. I wanted to use them two weeks ago but could not get passed it. I just gave up on 3rd card attempt. And btw why can't they support pay-pall? It always makes me uneasy to pass in the credit card details directly on a site.

Seems that under the guise of security it seems that sites can leave their payment process to be complete crap (UX/UI, feedback and everything else). I see this far too often; sometimes not even the "Error" appears, just a page reload without any indication. It is not that hard to be clear guys...

Re: C14, the Secure Cold Storage Platform, for Free During the Summer

#17

Post by masklinn » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 3:05 PM UTC

rsync wrote: post #14

boulos wrote: post #3

From their FAQ: > Where is my data stored? > Your data will be stored in our fallout shelter, located 25 meters under the ground in Paris, France, starting in September 2016. So where is it for now? And like Backblaze, a single site storage solution means you should only consider this as an extra backup (not primary storage). There's a note that in September they'll also be expanding to offer multisite, but don't hav…

"I can't imagine an S3/GCS bucket restriction like that, so I'm curious how customers will be expected to work around it." Amazon S3 has a 5TB object size limit and only 5GB (!) can be uploaded in a single PUT[1]. Different limits, but still something people have to work around. An actual filesystem on ZFS makes all of these limits disappear. Does anyone offer cloud storage based on that ? Man, that would be awesome.…

> An actual filesystem on ZFS makes all of these limits disappear. Does anyone offer cloud storage based on that ?

rsync.net advertises

> a ZFS filesystem, accessible with any SSH/SFTP tool, running on a UNIX system.

You're paying for that though, rsync.net starts at 8c/GB/month (for 10+TB), the smallest offering (under 1TB) is 20c/GB/month), by comparison S3 is 2.75c to 3c/GB/month in standard storage (and 1.25c/GB/month for IA)

Re: C14, the Secure Cold Storage Platform, for Free During the Summer

#18

Post by pbhjpbhj » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 3:18 PM UTC

belorn wrote: post #11

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #2

It seems really cheap, do you think it's sustainable at those prices?

From the perspective of sustainable, I can find retail harddrives for about €0.023 per GB (not counting taxes). This site take €0.002 per month, so with a very simplistic view, a harddrive is producing profits after about a year. There is of course many additional costs, and they could also be getting a better deal than current retail prices, but from a pure question of "X+1 customer mean a gain or a loss", I would l…

I'd expect energy costs of a data centre + wages to dwarf the actual HDD costs.

A half-hour support call is going to cost something like €10 - for which you need to service 5TB-months of data (ie one month of 5000GB of data at 0.2 euro-cents pays for the support cost in min. wage employees).

It's great if this is a sustainable business as I only have 1TB of data at home and probably only a third of that needs backing up. So 4TB-months of data per annum, €8 - that's much cheaper than buying a HDD myself c. £50 [currently €60] which I expect to have c. 5 years of life. Though the A in ADSL then starts getting really annoying.

Re: C14, the Secure Cold Storage Platform, for Free During the Summer

#19

Post by mikmak » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 3:19 PM UTC

boulos wrote: post #9

abermingham wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, multi-location will be proposed in September, you will be able to choose each location where you want your archive. The 40TB limit came from the temporary storage plateform who need to be fully provisioned for each active archives. This temporary storage is free of charge, we had to put some limitations to keep reasonable plateform. https://blog.online.net/content/images/2016/07/c14howitworks... The backend stor…

Good to know. So what facility are you in currently? And how much bandwidth do you have? (i.e., if I want to get 25 TB out for recovery, how long will that take in the best case?)

it is expected to take a few hours to un-archive datas as for the bandwidth, we have well enough (we have about 1.5tb/s global external capacity at the moment with various global IXes and many tier1 transits), the C14 platform network itself is designed to scale very easily (10g/40g unit base connections)

Mik (Online.net network)

Re: C14, the Secure Cold Storage Platform, for Free During the Summer

#20

Post by balamaci » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 3:36 PM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #13

I have to register my debit/credit card and it refuses with "Error" :) I asked support but that's not a very good start.

Funny thing is that I use Scaleway also, and did not have any problems registering a credit card with them. Since online.net and scaleway seem to be the same or related somehow, maybe they should copy-paste the CC validation code from them or allow login with the same user.