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Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

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Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#241

Post by virtuallynathan »

jamwt wrote: post #238
virtuallynathan wrote: post #229

It looks like the servers they make use of are purchasable, part of the Dell DSS series - the DSS7000: http://downloads.dell.com/manuals/common/dss%207000_dss%2075... 90x 3.5in disks, 2x compute nodes with 2x E5-2600v3 CPUs.

We actually use several different servers from different vendors, and some of them are more customized than others.

Ah, yes I spot the 78 bay Quanta one: http://www.qct.io/Product/Storage/Storage-Server/4U/New-Quan...

Can't identify the 3rd one yet...

EDIT: Found it... HPE Cloudline CL5200, 80 drive bays. http://www.nextplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/hpe-c...

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#242

Post by chronid »

voltagex_ wrote: post #180
stock_toaster wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a PCIe NVMe card (with a Samsung 950 pro M.2 in it) in my home server, which serves as an L2arc device for a ZFS pool. It is pretty nice. Runs a bit warm though.

We are now well offtopic but I've seen some advice recently that advises using an SLOG rather than L2ARC for a home NAS.

I think that a home nas would have a lot of async writes and very few/none sync writes. So a ZIL dedicated device (the SLOG) is not really useful/helpful. I'm not sure even if you really need an L2ARC device, just slap 8/16Gb of RAM on it and you will be happy...

Obviously if you are playing seriously with VMs and databases and whatever else both of those (SLOG/L2ARC) may become important for you, I'm going for the "i'm just using this to store my raw-format photos, backups for the taxes and other big files" kind of usage here. :)

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#243

Post by H4Y3s »

abhv wrote: post #102
jamwt wrote: post #2

Hi HN! A couple of us from the Magic Pocket software team are around to answer questions if anyone has some.

Does magic pocket use any non-standard error-correction algorithms, or just parity-style RAID5 or 6?

Hey that is cool. I worked on the first commercial disk array at Thinking Machines Corporation in 1988. We used Reed-Solomon encoding because we didn't trust that the drives would catch all the errors (they did). Good work solving some of those bandwidth constraints in rebuilding the data. John (Smitty) Hayes

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#245

Post by voltagex_ »

chronid wrote: post #242
voltagex_ wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are now well offtopic but I've seen some advice recently that advises using an SLOG rather than L2ARC for a home NAS.

I think that a home nas would have a lot of async writes and very few/none sync writes. So a ZIL dedicated device (the SLOG) is not really useful/helpful. I'm not sure even if you really need an L2ARC device, just slap 8/16Gb of RAM on it and you will be happy... Obviously if you are playing seriously with VMs and databases and whatever else both of those (SLOG/L2ARC) may become important for you, I'm going for the "…

You don't have any contact details but I'd definitely like to talk to you more about home NAS.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#246

Post by roel_v »

echelon wrote: post #214
roel_v wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'll never click on" Doesn't matter, impressions are valuable to marketers as well. "or be persuaded by ads" Yes you will, you just think you don't/won't.

> Yes you will, you just think you don't/won't. That's a really blanket statement. I'm rather minimalist, and I typically form negative opinions of the things I see in ads.

"and I typically form negative opinions of the things I see in ads."

Sure, until it's something that fits your world view, and then you don't.

Look, I'm usually the first to (excessively) qualify sweeping generalizations I make with 'generally', 'statistically speaking', 'ceteris paribus' and other weasel words. Yet in the context of pervasive marketing, I don't need to - everybody is swayed by some form of advertising, whether you realize it or want to admit it or not; 50 years of research and billions of dollars spend on that research tell us so unequivocally. But if you don't, it's better you start admitting it to yourself - if only because it gives you better insight into your own internal psychological processes.

Then again who am I to give unsolicited paternalizing advice to strangers.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#247

Post by cj0 »

Some requests for the DropBox Diskotech tech blog series: For which datacenter cooling system are the Diskotech storage pods designed? Hot aisle cold aisle? How evenly can the disks inside the Diskotech be cooled? With this question I try to ask, how good is it in keeping all drives cool? For example for the theoretical case where all disks in the Diskotech are dissipating identical heat, how much variation is there in drive temperature at roughly 25ºC intake temperature? How much power is consumed for cooling (despite that it will be fractionally low compared to what the disks will consume)? Is there any drive idle optimization done or is the expectance that not any disk will reach its idle (non-rotating) state ever? Is there any optimization done inside a Diskotech to reduce the (inrush) current surge when connecting the machine to power?

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#248

Post by _urga »

jamwt wrote: post #232
_urga wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely it's the other way round? That is, the better your software can handle repair, the smaller your failure domain can be? A larger failure domain would only make sense if you wanted to minimize the compute required per unit stored?

We do want to minimize that--compute costs money, and storage is irreducible. But you can only reduce aggressively if your larger distributed system is great at repairs, since the failure of a single box kicks off 1PB of repair activity!

Thanks, do you have a time lapse backup of data in Magic Pocket? For example, in case of software error?

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#249

Post by TimJRobinson »

echelon wrote: post #171

Unrelated to the content of the article--I've never seen the oft talked about "anti-adblocker interstitial" before. I was surprised to find that the website blocks viewing of the article entirely because I'm running Adblock. It's an interesting subject. I'll never click on or be persuaded by ads, so they're not really gaining anything by showing me ads. I'm essentially worthless traffic to them no matter how they cut…

Disappointing that you can't even view it with "Disconnect" enabled. I'm ok with seeing ads, but not ok with sites sending my data off to 15 different advertising companies every time I load a page.

According to disconnect that one page sends data to 15 different advertising sites, 15 different analytics services and many other content services. So much for fighting for their readers privacy online.

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