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

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#31

Post by thawaway1837 » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 9:01 PM UTC

Taek wrote: post #28

walrus01 wrote: post #18

I work in telecom/datacenter infrastructure and this is fanciful. The whole way they take the wattage load of one machine and then hand wave away all of the rest of the costs of either building and running a datacenter, or paying ongoing monthly colocation costs... Is just scary. I truly don't mean to offend anyone but this looks like a bunch of enthusiastic dilettantes. Generators? UPS? Cooling costs? Square footage…

Its super interesting to dive into the world of cryptocurrency mining, where some DCs are getting PUE of 1.1 or better with a buildout that's basically amounts to shelves and box fans. No generators, just eat the downtime. No batteries. No 24/7 staff. No racks, just shelves (folded sheet metal is cheap). Security varies from farm to farm. These servers don't need to run cool, as long as you are in a climate that does…

Crypto currency servers didn’t need to last though. Their primary components were being replaced regularly with the latest generations.

Here they’re depreciating components over 7 years, so will those components last 7 years under those conditions?

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#32

Post by aresant » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 9:01 PM UTC

Top of Hacker News and there's nothing clickable above the fold that takes me to the SIA website.

Content marketers and technical marketers - don't miss the opportunity on Medium and other platforms to at VERY LEAST link to your homepage in the first section.

In fact that is at the top of this awesome piece of content marketing is a "Sign Up" button for Medium . . .

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#33

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 9:02 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#34

Post by ajross » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 9:02 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #29

Taek wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its super interesting to dive into the world of cryptocurrency mining, where some DCs are getting PUE of 1.1 or better with a buildout that's basically amounts to shelves and box fans. No generators, just eat the downtime. No batteries. No 24/7 staff. No racks, just shelves (folded sheet metal is cheap). Security varies from farm to farm. These servers don't need to run cool, as long as you are in a climate that does…

If all you intend to do is generate hashes and run for the exits when your mining equipment is no longer economical, due to difficulty increase, sure. Reliable data storage for paying customers is a very different thing.

Per-site reliability (beyond a stated/assumed 95%, which is right around the "I put a computer on my desk" level) isn't a design goal, though. You can argue with their math or their assumptions, but you can't say they're wrong for not designing in the reliability features you list above.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#35

Post by walrus01 » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 9:04 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #34

walrus01 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all you intend to do is generate hashes and run for the exits when your mining equipment is no longer economical, due to difficulty increase, sure. Reliable data storage for paying customers is a very different thing.

Per-site reliability (beyond a stated/assumed 95%, which is right around the "I put a computer on my desk" level) isn't a design goal, though. You can argue with their math or their assumptions, but you can't say they're wrong for not designing in the reliability features you list above.

Things on my desk are meeting three nines or better of uptime at present, 95% would be 18 days hard down per year.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#36

Post by Taek » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 9:05 PM UTC

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, you can get away with very scrappy setups. The whole point is that it's not a highly reliable facility.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#37

Post by TheDong » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 9:05 PM UTC

growt wrote: post #9

I feel like backblaze has already done most of this and has it in production [1]. Whereas this is just done back of the napkin calculation. [1] https://www.backblaze.com/b2/storage-pod.html

Backblaze has tried to make their datacenter as efficient as possible, and still only ends up hitting $5/tb/mo for their b2 service, as a point of reference.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#38

Post by TheDong » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 9:06 PM UTC

This analysis entirely omits the cost of a sysadmin to manage the storage servers. Even if sia is assumed to do almost everything, and even if we only want 95% uptime, you still need someone to deal with software updates, hard drive monitoring, etc etc.

The profit of $570/year/box is not enough to pay a part-time sysadmin and still have any useful profit.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#39

Post by Taek » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 9:07 PM UTC

jakear wrote: post #14

> That means about 2 hours of labor per rig. We’ll call that $50 Does that seem low to anyone else? I don’t really have any background in the area, but 25/hr cost to the company would be less than 20/hr pay for the skilled labor. Other countries are different of course, but in US I could make that much flipping burgers in the right area.

Assembling computers and replacing drives is generally speaking unskilled labor, right there next to factory workers.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#40

Post by Kliment » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 9:07 PM UTC

pedrocr wrote: post #8

It's probably feasible to reach these levels of cost. I certainly still keep NAS in two locations because even places like hetzner don't sell lower powered machines with lots of disk space. But the build they specify doesn't have a CPU or RAM and it's using a SAS cable to connect to a SATA motherboard. Depending on the requirements of the platform they may be able to get away with non-ECC RAM, a simple APU to not nee…

Hetzner's super cheap "cloud" machines allow you to attach "block storage" volumes of whatever size you like. It's not particularly well advertised (searching for this sort of thing takes you to their dedicated storage offerings) but it's there and it's great.