151–160 of 353 posts
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Who are the customers for such unreliable systems?
Sia is very reliable from the customer's perspective. Its only individual systems and storage pools that have lax uptime requirements. Thanks to some clever network-level redundancy mechanisms (10-of-30 redundancy), 95% uptime at the storage pool level translates to 99.9999% uptime from the customer's perspective. See the "Uptime Math" section in the OP for details.
I'm going through Sia's website now. It seems this article is meant to bolster the claim on their website which states "When the Sia network is fully optimized, pricing will fall somewhere around $2/TB/month." [1] Call me skeptical but it seems that they aren't committing to building out this infrastructure themselves or providing a specific amount of storage at this pricing. They seem to be outlining a potential inf…
Just looking at the website for Sia I see a bunch of fluffy marketing stuff, fair enough, that's normal these days. But where is the selling point? https://sia.tech/technology tells me my data is stored securely and in a redundant manner, great, just like any storage provider. That is followed by "Renters And Hosts Pay With Siacoin" and talks about payment channels, which links to a wikipedia article and not something that tells me how I would even pay them, not to even talk about how much (I saw the calculator thingy on my way to that site, the messaging is still weird).
The "Getting started" call to action is a similar experience, a bunch of downloads, cool - I don't even know if you're right for me yet. I'm five levels deep into the "Getting started guide" linked there and so far found that I'd apparently have to deal with weird crypto exchanges to pay somebody for this, plus I couldn't use most of my pretty standard tooling anymore (at least not without involving one of those proxy things on the getting started page that cover a few use cases, some of which seem to be operated by others?).
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I think his point is that he's targeting low aggregate uptime, too.
Definitely not, aggregate uptime is extremely high. We've never seen downtime do to network outages, only software bugs. And even then, only some users were impacted by the bugs, we've never in 5 years had a broad outage.
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It's outrageously low. They're also fancifully assuming cpu tdp = electrical power, cooling = 0w, and another 0w to the motherboard/network cards. And each box has 1 non-redundant, schmuck-grade $80 psu, as well as a consumer grade mobo. This would never be anywhere near their uptime.
CPU TDP is accounted for, the CPU linked in the blog post draws 65w and that is used in the electricity calculations. I did realize that I completely forgot about RAM, when I get back to a computer I'll have to make some updates, but it won't materially move the numbers, there's 33% margin of error between the number in the spreadsheet and $2 / TB / Mo. The $80 PSU is what I could link to from Newegg, I do have exper…
Yes, you forgot ram. And network chips, motherboard power delivery losses, motherboard power usage, cabling losses, etc. I'd guess it would total 50-100w, but feel free to current clamp the psu rails to get a realistic number.
As for the 95% uptime, I agree with you. I wasn't considering how much breathing room that actually provides, I was just going with my instincts.
I worked on the design of Dropbox's exabyte-scale storage system, and from that experience I can say that these numbers are all extremely optimistic, even with their "you can do it cheaper if you only target 95% uptime" caveat. Networking is much more expensive, labor is much more expensive, space is much more expensive, depreciation is faster than they say, etc etc. I don't think the authors have ever done any actua…
I looked at their parts list and it's obvious they aren't serious. CPU is missing, memory is missing, SAS to SATA cables, but no SAS controller, no mounting for the system board. Low effort at best.
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> exabyte-scale storage system Somewhat of a random question, can you point me to some state of the art research?
Storage Systems of this scale are thesedays almost exclusively built around object based storage rather than "legacy" block or file backed solutions. I guess today, min.io is would be the way to go. (to "go".. little pun on the end:)
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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.
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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.
https://support.sia.tech/article/dk91b0eibc-welcome-to-sia - this support article is also a good introduction to the network and why it was built
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How much is a terabyte of dropbox storage?
Dropbox is $10/TB/mo, which is the "old" industry standard (and still what most big guys charge). Backblaze is $5, but they charge egress fees, so usage matters. Dropbox doesn't charge for egress, but there are limits on "Public" folder bandwidth (and you can't pay for more if you max out). I don't think there are limits on private content, but I bet there's a soft throttle or some limit that will get you contacted.…
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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…
OVH, the massive hosting company, is located in a former aluminum smelter next to a hydroelectric dam in Quebec. They keep costs as low as absolutely possible, but their operating costs as a whole are still considerably higher than something designed with one nine of uptime. I get that you're mostly joking by saying "yeah sometimes everything shorts out", but we have electrical codes in the US/Canada for a reason.
Saying "this entire building is designed to catch fire, and if it does, it won't do harm to neighbouring buildings, people, or the environment" is probably a good start.