There is way too much hand-waving and assuming going on this article. It is a load of BS that does not take into account real-world inefficiencies. e.g. sometimes buying in bulk is more expensive than buying at retail, esp when you need consistent supply. Sure, you may need only an hour of sysadmin time a day, but what sysadmin will let you employ them an hour a day? The buildout did not list a CPU. The assumptions about uptime are over-amortized, an outage given the resources they quote may average out to 95% uptime but their latency for getting systems back up is going to be absolutely terrible and I’d be surprised if outages were shorter than a day or two on average. They aren’t factoring in cooling. They aren’t factoring in the drastically reduced lifetime of drives in their ridiculously cramped and under-ventilated cubbies. They are completely ignoring diagnostic time, presuming they can only quote actual repair times, which is an absolute joke given the lack of smart hardware and enterprise DC management. They think they can average out throughout over the number of drives not taking into account per-channel limitations. They are not taking into account the extra time to build and dismantle systems in their hacked-together IKEA shelves. They are underestimating the costs of electricity at commercial rates. I could go on and on, but suffice to say that I would never, ever use their network for any purpose without another backup (which they don’t finger into their costs, of course ;). I thought B2 was risky; this is taking it to an entirely different level.
Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month
141–150 of 353 posts
Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure! First up, we don't do repairs every time one host goes down. Standard practice on the network is to wait to do a repair until a full 25% of the redundancy is missing (in 64-of-96, that would be 8 hosts offline). Then you repair all 8 at once, significantly reducing the total amount of repair traffic. But secondly, offline doesn't usually mean dead and gone, with unstable datacenters like this they are usually b…
That sounds incredibly energy-inefficient. On average you have 12.5% of servers running but not contributing and possibly incurring load on other nodes.
Turn 'em off if they're not contributing.
Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month
#143Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month
#144In addition to what other people mentioned, there is also a huge cost in managing all the metadata that you'd get from billions of files. This really even worse if you're using a crazy 64-32 encoding.
Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point is that the cost should not be the main motivator. I would agree that there needs to be other differentiators in addition to cost, which could provide sufficient moat against other competitors, big or small.
It's possible that there could be non-obvious innovations in how to save money with a low reliability threshold, which Amazon might not be able to effortlessly copy.
It should also be noted that you can get S3 storage for $1/TB/month already if you use the Glacier Deep Archive storage class.
Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month
#146at a minimum the facility will need some power conditioning and/or insurance. you don't want a brief power surge to eat all of your capital, and lockup fees, in one go. > For a 32 HDD system, you expect about 5 drives to fail per year. This takes time to repair and you will need on-site staff (just not 24/7). To account for these costs, we will budget $50 per year per rig. will you not also lose 6TB (times utilizatio…
Isn't a potential problem with "SATA splitters" also that all disks will share the same channel an therefore end up with worse performance? (Though I guess it won't make a difference for mechanical drives)
Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I didn't read all their math but I expect their final result to be off by a factor of 2-5x. Can't be more than 2.5 because Backblaze B2 already gives you $5/TB/Mo.
Backblaze is operating at their own economy of scale with dedicated deals with suppliers, custom bare bones hardware, optimized processes, etc. It's always more expensive starting out as a little company for raw hardware and processes until you're big enough and mature enough to get the deals and processes in place. That is also not the only service that Backblaze offers and wasn't their first. It could be that B2 is…
If all their other customers on the $5/month unlimited backup plan store less than 1TB, but since it’s really aggressive about backing up everything (no, please don’t back up my steam games) on your computer I think they go over that.
Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Abandoned pepboys stores don't usually have very good fiber connectivity. Backblaze and similar hosting/storage companies move enough traffic that they need to be topologically close to major IX points. If all you want is cheap commercial real estate with cheap dollars per square foot figures, there are plenty of economically depressed areas within the United States that you could put things. Those areas usually have…
> Abandoned pepboys stores don't usually have very good fiber connectivity. Backblaze and similar hosting/storage companies move enough traffic that they need to be topologically close to major IX points. Not stores. Data centers. It is typically cheaper to get long distance fiber links than metro fiber and midsize data centers do not consume that much power, power which is plentiful outside the major metros, especia…
I didn't expect to see Pep Boys as an example. Do/did they have their own data centers?
Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Sia is a lot more than a low cost storage platform. It's a full reimagining of how the cloud should work with an emphasis on user ownership and control, open access for developers, and ultimately decentralization that allows users to be certain their applications will always work (no more "RSS Reader is shutting down"). This post is intended to address people who do not feel that decentralization can be cost effectiv…
Where do I find the introduction what Sia is? I tried clicking around in the headers from OP, but couldn't find it within my very lazy tolerance.
Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month
#150I 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…
They're not talking about a datacenter. Datacenters need to be reliable. Sia storage pools don't, because security and reliability is achieved at the global network level, not at the level of individual systems or storage pools. 95% reliability means you can be down for two whole weeks out of every year and still be well within acceptable uptime requirements. Generators? Who needs those? Just wait for the power to co…
I'll pass, thanks.