261–270 of 353 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is not to do it cheaper but better.
... better than AWS with its SLAs, that every major company relies on to some extent?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
When you says Sia is reliable, do you mean it could be reliable if hypothetical X, Y, and Z things happen? Because according to the homepage (sia.tech) there are only 895 hosts storing a total of 206TB right now, which is a very, very small amount. Backblaze, a relatively small player as compared to the big cloud providers has 1.1 million TB of raw capacity as of last year (redundancy reduces the available capacity,…
As for the relatively small number of hosts at present, 895 is more than enough for 10-of-30 redundancy to work "as advertised". You really only need 30 hosts technically. The bigger issue I think is the relative immaturity of the software. Sia is still pretty new compared to most other data storage systems; and although I've never heard of any software bugs in Sia resulting in data loss, that doesn't mean such a bug will never be discovered. Be cautious, keep backups, and never rely on any single storage medium to store your data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
When you says Sia is reliable, do you mean it could be reliable if hypothetical X, Y, and Z things happen? Because according to the homepage (sia.tech) there are only 895 hosts storing a total of 206TB right now, which is a very, very small amount. Backblaze, a relatively small player as compared to the big cloud providers has 1.1 million TB of raw capacity as of last year (redundancy reduces the available capacity,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is actually not correct. Because of AWS scale it cannot be the cheapest. Amazon cannot use odd lots or small lots, which means that it has very few possible suppliers and those suppliers will never be the cheapest. Same goes for the network infrastructure. While it is possible buy 100Gbit/sec at a throw away price to because some sales person needs to make his numbers and neither he nor his director of sales thi…
you are wrong that AWS pays more than small vendors.
If you are able to take advantage of sales and clearance deals here and there, you are very likely to get a lower price than even the biggest buyers.
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.
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. Can't be more than 2.5 because Backblaze B2 already gives you $5/TB/Mo.
Earlier 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…
> If there was a demand for sorta-reliable, they'd build a sorta-reliable S3 and undercut you. Amazon's goal is to get people to pay a premium to get access to their entire ecosystem of services. They don't optimize the price of each individual service. There's a lot of take it or leave it for their specific offerings. Look at how they used to have reduced redundancy as a cost saver, but don't anymore. If you want co…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If there was a demand for sorta-reliable, they'd build a sorta-reliable S3 and undercut you. Amazon's goal is to get people to pay a premium to get access to their entire ecosystem of services. They don't optimize the price of each individual service. There's a lot of take it or leave it for their specific offerings. Look at how they used to have reduced redundancy as a cost saver, but don't anymore. If you want co…
S3 Reduced Redundancy is replaced with S3 Infrequent Access (and another lower tier One-Zone Infrequent Access) so there's still some pricing flexibility available.
Actually, looking closer, is one-zone even storing fewer copies? It's offering the same durability, except in the case of "availability zone destruction". So if they're selling three copies for $10 a TB, then the equivalent price for 64-of-96 would be $5 a TB. Cutting that down with cheaper worse hardware would go a long way to get you toward the $2 goal.
I expected this title to be about https://www.scaleway.com/en/c14-cold-storage/ which already offers exactly that, Cloud storage for $2 per TB per month.
Earlier 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…