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

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#291

Post by dannyw » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 9:36 AM UTC

yourapostasy wrote: post #117

arcticbull wrote: post #70

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…

> ...they'd build a sorta-reliable S3... From operational experience reports of S3 I've seen out there and discussions [1], including on HN [2], once you reach a large enough object count, S3 is "sorta-reliable". Objects will disappear. The durability claim is not SLA-enforced [3], which is uptime-oriented. The only remedy is a service credit. [1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/19/data_durability_sta... [2] ht…

Had about 20k objects and lost one (405s no matter what) about six month in.

I didn’t think much about it, but I guess I was really unlucky.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#292

Post by dannyw » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 9:39 AM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #147

TrueDuality wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Backblaze deduplicates data right? So it doesn’t really cost them anything to back up your steam games.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#293

Post by drak0n1c » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 9:57 AM UTC

franciscop wrote: post #288

The website seemed okay and even useful until: "Both renters and hosts use Siacoin, a unique cryptocurrency built on the Sia blockchain. Renters use Siacoin to buy storage capacity from hosts, while hosts deposit Siacoin into each file contract as collateral."

Until payment processing for regular money becomes free, peer-to-peer micropayments can only be done economically with a cryptocurrency. The need for a new unique crypto currency for this project is debatable, but I can understand that the people who work on this project full-time need to earn a paycheck.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#294

Post by toolslive » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 10:09 AM UTC

Taek wrote: post #36

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…

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,…

OTOH, your object storage can be even cheaper if you don't do Reed-Solomon erasure coding, but use rateless erasure codes. For example, online codes[1] have been used by Amplidata to have more reliable storage with lower overhead. There are downsides however (no partial reads, no mutability, ....)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_codes

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#295

Post by mcdevilkiller » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 10:33 AM UTC

kybernetikos wrote: post #191

__jal wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of a saying from the first dot.com crash. (Or at least I heard it then first.) Tying two bricks together doesn't make them float.

It's a great saying, but aren't all large ships these days made out of components that don't float individually?

No, they are mostly made of air, which floats (Partial sarcasm, as that is what makes them float)

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#296

Post by jan6 » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 10:34 AM UTC

dannyw wrote: post #292

Aeolun wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Backblaze deduplicates data right? So it doesn’t really cost them anything to back up your steam games.

they'd probably charge you the same anyway, even if THEY get it at basically free ;)

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#297

Post by ds » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 10:41 AM UTC

The most important thing not addressed here is demand. Last I checked (granted, this was a while ago) it simply wasnt there- Meaning if you built this rig you might only be able to rent out a small part of it.

If this has changed I would be interested in hearing about it-

One other thing I am not understanding is how this makes financial sense, even if the demand is there. If I am buying a rig for 4500 bucks to get 200TB, making "570 a year in profit" is nowhere near exciting enough. Practically any other use pays more. Renting a dedicated server for a game, web hosting, hell even GPU mining makes more.

(a single 1080ti can do about 1$ a day in gross revenue on grin/eth/etc - which can be had used for ~400 bucks- Or you can get a p102 which is the mining card version with no display output for 250 bucks) - Payback with power costs/etc.. well below the 10 year threshold of siacoin)

Now where it might be interesting (IF there is demand), is just adding harddrives to an existing infrastructure already in place. So if you are a GPU miner and have 1000 rigs already in place, just adding a single 4TB harddrive to each machine might not be too bad- They go for about $50 each used and according to this, will pay back $8 a month with minimal extra costs

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#298

Post by jan6 » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 10:41 AM UTC

z3t4 wrote: post #66

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…

Storage can be far cheaper when decentralized. Sending data over the Atlantic is super expensive compared to LAN networking. Almost all content providers peer with ISP's with onsite hardware. But why stop there, put the "racks" in ppl's basements. Data storage is very compact now a days, you can probably fit 100 TB is a shoe-box.

that'd need trust that they won't run off with your drives, their basement won't get flooded, there aren't power outages often, they have good protections against surges and whatnot... which at ANY datacenter, is automatically included ;)

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#299

Post by jan6 » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 10:44 AM UTC

FalconSensei wrote: post #189

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…

> Hard drives are a surprisingly low percentage of the cost of a storage system THIS! There's no use of a 2TB storage if you can't upload/download this amount each month

have you ever heard of backups and archiving? ;) there are lots of scenarios when you'd want to write some amount, but not read it back for a while, if ever...

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#300

Post by lucb1e » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 10:46 AM UTC

dannyw wrote: post #292

Aeolun wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Backblaze deduplicates data right? So it doesn’t really cost them anything to back up your steam games.

They can't deduplicate properly encrypted data, that will have to happen client-side. So while they can deduplicate your data (if you have a copy of a picture in multiple places or maybe even a game installed on multiple machines), it won't work across users.