Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month • Hacker News Board

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#251

Post by generatorguy » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 3:37 AM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #160

walrus01 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In most places you don't need to build to code, as long as you take other steps to mitigate risk. 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.

Insurance?

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#252

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 3:41 AM UTC

Legogris wrote: post #136

Taek wrote: post #127

Earlier 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.

[deleted]

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#253

Post by animalnewbie » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 3:43 AM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #70

Taek wrote: post #36

Earlier 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…

> (paraphrased) domain experience means they ae best

As someone who has worked with a couple of market leaders in their respective fields i want to disssaude anyone who would listen of this notion. NO, the market leaders aren't doing things optimally. Some things are downright stupid.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#254

Post by prostheticvamp » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 3:48 AM UTC

winfred wrote: post #155

kmod wrote: post #15

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 didn't read all their math but I expect their final result to be off by a factor of 2-5x. 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.

It seems you’re getting heavily downvoted. I think it’s because CPU and memory are not missing.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#255

Post by animalnewbie » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 3:49 AM UTC

breakyerself wrote: post #51

wmf wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not talking about a real datacenter; they're talking about a deathtrap crypto mine with hard disks instead of GPUs/ASICs. Can't you run a million hard disks off a consumer cable modem? ;-) At the (slow) rate Sia is growing, I don't think there will ever be enough demand to justify this design anyway.

How much is a terabyte of dropbox storage?

For $6 per month (paid yearly) you get 1tb of OneDrive + office (desktop applications). My math maybe off but if you buy office every 3 years for $200 then you're already even.... And 1TB of storage is just free really.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#256

Post by zchrykng » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 4:03 AM UTC

jakewalker wrote: post #94

prepend wrote: post #59

Earlier 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.

I mean, the concept actually works, but you have to understand what is actually going into the bundled product. There is no reason you couldn't bundle 100 million in mortgages that had a 10% default risk and sell 10 million of that bundle as AAA.

It is when you just start bundling everything and then saying the entire thing is AAA that the trouble starts.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#257

Post by tw04 » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 4:11 AM UTC

statictype wrote: post #203

sydney6 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:)

What does object-based mean? How is an object different from a file (which I presumed was a collection of blocks)?

It means you access your object through a GUID. Think about it like parking your own car vs. a valet. When you park your own car you need to know the address of the garage you parked in, the floor you were on, and the spot you were in. When you valet park, you hand the attendant a ticket and he brings your car back.

With a standard fileshare, you need to walk the filesystem to retrieve your file - this incurs a ton of metadata overhead. It also means when you've got potentially billions of files in a directory, it can be slooooowww. All the metadata requests also make it very chatty - so doing it over a WAN link tends to be extremely painful if it works at all. Newer versions of SMB and NFS have done a lot to batch the metadata requests but they are still protocols meant to happen at extremely low latency inside a datacenter.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#258

Post by justinmeiners » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 4:27 AM UTC

iampims wrote: post #234

justinmeiners wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Just probability. If you have fully redundant services then ALL of them have to go down to have an outage. Suppose you 5 copies with 75% uptime each. The probability that all of them are down is 0.25^5 ~ 0.0009 Now of course that assumes they are uncorrelated, but since Sia nodes are distributed across the internet, that's likely as opposed to multiple servers at a few data centers like AWS. Turns out mor…

They all run the same software stack though, so despite being deployed on diverse hardware, so they can’t claim to only have independent failure modes.

True. It would be interesting to analyze what others aspects are correlated.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#259

Post by rasz » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 4:53 AM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #142

Legogris wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Spinning iron doesnt like start/stop cycles. Server drives go thru very few in their entire life for that very reason.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#260

Post by teknopurge » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 5:16 AM UTC

Aunche wrote: post #122

prepend wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redundancy, I assume. Lots of unreliable facilities and nodes can be very durable in aggregate.

Redundancy is kind of meaningless unless if you have sufficient diversity. If all your replicas are located on the same rack, you're screwed if there is a minor disaster like a sprinkler going off.

This is why the post is a red-herring. You cannot use storage if you cannot get to it. Talking about the price of disk space/mth is absolutely useless without talking about the bandwidth required to use it, which means, if you want to go big-boys-math, 95% bandwidth and peering agreement pricing. That $1.50 with all the network chatter between hosts for replication/repair/etc., not to mention actually _downloading_ of the data from the Sia network will take that $1.50/TB/mth to $70/TB/mth.

Talking about the disk-space pricing is, IMO, disingenuous. Talk about the math for an all-in use-case of the service. I appreciate what the OP is going for, however, hand-waving around uncomfortable critical items like bandwidth cost for the Sia network is not a good look.