Honestly, I'm a bit confused on who the targeted audience is for this article. I've been running as a host for Sia for months now. My rig is a raspberry pi and a 10tb external HDD I had laying around.
Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month
111–120 of 353 posts
Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month
#112I have no clue how google stores my 35TB for $12 a month. They do at a loss and I guess they don’t really care.
Where are you getting that price? Google Drive is 300$+ for that and GCP archive storage is 140$.
Edit: apparently that's the unlimited storage in GSuite for 12$/month/user as long as you have 5 users or more.
Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month
#113Durability? Availability?
Availability is the big one. Getting high availability makes systems incredibly more complex and expensive. It's the same reason increasing redundancy and uptime to the next factor of nines is almost logarithmatically more expensive.
Increasing redundancy and uptime to the next factor of nines is exponentially* more expensive.
Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Redundancy, I assume. Lots of unreliable facilities and nodes can be very durable in aggregate.
Sounds kinda like the people who thought that bundling a bunch of bad mortgage debt together in slices could get it rated AAA.
Reminds me of a saying from the first dot.com crash. (Or at least I heard it then first.)
Tying two bricks together doesn't make them float.
Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month
#115I worked for a p2p startup 15 years ago. We were exploring ideas and products in this space. We came close to partnering with a company doing distributed cloud storage. Their idea was to allow people to rent storage space in personal computers.
We decided to scrap the plan to do p2p storage, ended up using cloud storage. This p2p storage idea is a tough one. People are not willing to make a few dimes renting out their hard drive or CPU. The economic unit is too small to work. But good luck trying this idea. I wouldn't be surprised if someone tries again in 20 years. :)
Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month
#116Honestly, I'm a bit confused on who the targeted audience is for this article. I've been running as a host for Sia for months now. My rig is a raspberry pi and a 10tb external HDD I had laying around.
Do you make anything from it?
Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Author here. A lot of these numbers are drawn from experience in the mining world, where people realized that when cost is the ultimate bottom line, a lot of corners can be cut. Sia systems don't need a ton of networking. I ran the networking buildout costs by some networking people, and again it comes down to cutting corners. If you only need 10 gbps per rack, if you don't mind having extra milliseconds added, etc,…
Here's the issue. We know that due to economy of scale and domain experience, AWS will always have the lowest cost (to Amazon) for storage -- whether that's totally-reliable storage, or sorta-reliable. If there was a demand for sorta-reliable, they'd build a sorta-reliable S3 and undercut you. Then, blockchain adds inefficiency. Therefore, it's basically impossible for any blockchain solution to have a lower total co…
> ...they'd build a sorta-reliable S3...
From operational experience reports of S3 I've seen out there and discussions [1], including on HN [2], once you reach a large enough object count, S3 is "sorta-reliable". Objects will disappear. The durability claim is not SLA-enforced [3], which is uptime-oriented. The only remedy is a service credit.
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/19/data_durability_sta...
Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month
#118I wouldn't even buy new hardware. I would buy retired hardware for a fraction of the price.
I would imagine that managing such a pool of dated and highly heterogeneous hardware would incur a lot of overhead. The procurement effort may end up being rather high as well.
Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month
#119I work in telecom/datacenter infrastructure and this is fanciful. The whole way they take the wattage load of one machine and then hand wave away all of the rest of the costs of either building and running a datacenter, or paying ongoing monthly colocation costs... Is just scary. I truly don't mean to offend anyone but this looks like a bunch of enthusiastic dilettantes. Generators? UPS? Cooling costs? Square footage…
I think it's interesting to dive into the economics of 95% uptime. Maybe you don't need full datacenter cooling; you can just locate in a cool climate and have a fan in the window blowing cold air in. If there's a blizzard, you lose your drives because snow blows in and melts on your drives. If the chance of the blizzard * price of drives is less than needing 750W of cooling, then you win. Yeah, sometimes everything…
> I also don't have a use case for 95% availability. (That's two weeks a year where your data is gone!)
Gone from only one of the places it's stored. Your data is still available even if just 10 out of 30 servers are online.
Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Author here. A lot of these numbers are drawn from experience in the mining world, where people realized that when cost is the ultimate bottom line, a lot of corners can be cut. Sia systems don't need a ton of networking. I ran the networking buildout costs by some networking people, and again it comes down to cutting corners. If you only need 10 gbps per rack, if you don't mind having extra milliseconds added, etc,…
Sure, let's dig into networking. Who pays for rereplication traffic? If you do 64-of-96 RS encoding, that means for every failure you need to transfer 64x the lost storage capacity. If you're targeting a "low individual uptime but high aggregate uptime" model this means you need to be storing data in multiple sites -- and dedicated cross-geo bandwidth is expensive. I agree that in the happy case you can use low-bandw…
I think his point is that he's targeting low aggregate uptime, too.