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

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#341

Post by Ajedi32 » Sun, Mar 08, 2020, 5:02 AM UTC

jstummbillig wrote: post #311

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…

So, is this it? Dropbox designer challenges the project broadly, gets top comment, Author refutes – and we leave it at that? I mean this is basically the moment where I would expect every systems designer on HN coming out of the woods and crushing Sia into the ground, if there were, in fact, any ground at all to crush Sia into. Is this actually legit? If so, where is the rejoicing? What am I missing?

The fact that nobody is able to prove it's a bad idea doesn't necessarily mean it's a good one. There might still be other downsides that haven't been considered, some of which could be solveable with more development work and some not.

At this point the cautious skeptic will be thinking "hmm, maybe there's something to this", not necessarily full on rejoicing.

That said, I agree it does seem promising. If you ever find yourself in need of cheap cloud storage it wouldn't hurt to look into Sia as a possible option.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#342

Post by rishabhd » Sun, Mar 08, 2020, 5:49 AM UTC

Offtopic question : I went through their website, and I have no idea about blockchain. I have gone through the documentation and almost everything they are doing is possible without it as well. Cryptoproofs for storing data, smart contracts et al - not sure if it is different from regular encrypted deduplication done regularly with standard per hour/ per minute billing. Also, Siacoin for payment, not sure if it is the most optimal way. I think I am missing something, would be glad if someone can point me in the right direction.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#343

Post by enaaem » Sun, Mar 08, 2020, 11:35 AM UTC

nojvek wrote: post #327

enaaem wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very good point! Let's say you move into a new market, trying to undercut the status quo. The status quo, with their power of scale and experience can just undercut you back. Who is benefitting from this? The customers! So if the customers want more competition they have to pay you to play. Which means they have to co-invest with you and promise to buy your service later. A good is example are the Apple iPhone screen…

Not really. Suppose giant A undercuts startup B where A is making a temporary loss but B runs out of money trying to complete, only A remains in the market and A starts charging a premium since it doesn’t have completion. This is bad for customers in the long term. Like how Amazon is slowly destroying brick and mortar stores, or having Amazon Basics at the front undercutting other sellers. Monopolies mean you don’t h…

It's true that benefits for customers would likely be only temporary. But that is not my main point.

I'm explaining a common business move called pay to play, in industries that require very high investments for new competitors. If customers want B to compete, they have to pay B first to ensure B does not make a loss, so everyone wins a little in the end.

So in the case of OP. He needs to finds paying customers first, who are willing to pre-order his service.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#344

Post by allendoerfer » Sun, Mar 08, 2020, 7:04 PM UTC

feross wrote: post #134

jakewalker wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds kinda like the people who thought that bundling a bunch of bad mortgage debt together in slices could get it rated AAA.

Your mind is going to be blown when you learn how TCP/IP works.

Or computers for that matter. Deep down it is not really about 1s and 0s, more like thresholds in between 1 and 0.

To me a big part of computer science is abstracting away unreliable details to make them seem reliable.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#345

Post by tuananh » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 8:18 AM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #323

jstummbillig wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, is this it? Dropbox designer challenges the project broadly, gets top comment, Author refutes – and we leave it at that? I mean this is basically the moment where I would expect every systems designer on HN coming out of the woods and crushing Sia into the ground, if there were, in fact, any ground at all to crush Sia into. Is this actually legit? If so, where is the rejoicing? What am I missing?

Dropbox designer name dropped "64-of-96 RS encoding" as if they're the only person that's heard of, or dealt with Reed-solomon encoding before, and expected the author to get scared off. There is, in the case of drop box, plenty of ground to crush Sia into. That is the ground between the 95% and multiple-nines of availability. Engineering is about tradeoffs. I could build a network as good as Google's with infinite m…

no. the author mentions "64-of-96" things in the post as well. I don't think kmod means to do what you said.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#346

Post by Aeolun » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 10:31 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.

In that case I’d also expect them to skip uploading the data, but everything is uploaded.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#347

Post by Legogris » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 10:59 AM UTC

H8crilA wrote: post #248

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.

12.5% overhead isn't that much. It's what just the networking gear can easily eat in a data center (12% out of all the non-cooling-related power supply). Reed-Solomon encoding adds 50%, of you want 3 block per 2 data blocks. Replicated encoding (not relevant here since this is allow throughput usecase, but necessary if you want to sustain high read throughput) is adding at least 200% (if you want a 3x replication, wh…

12.5% is far from the total overhead, just an additional compounding factor.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#348

Post by flatiron » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 5:32 PM UTC

pedrocr wrote: post #112

flatiron wrote: post #72

I have no clue how google stores my 35TB for $12 a month. They do at a loss and I guess they don’t really care.

Where are you getting that price? Google Drive is 300$+ for that and GCP archive storage is 140$. Edit: apparently that's the unlimited storage in GSuite for 12$/month/user as long as you have 5 users or more.

they say you need 5 people but its just me and i pay $12

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#349

Post by winfred » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 7:35 PM UTC

prostheticvamp wrote: post #254

winfred wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

That wasn't on that page when I opened it, you think I'd miss that? They were reading the comments here and updated the page after I wrote the comment.

The price was $4700 something, now it's $4945.

They simply smooth over it with this:

"So we will be using a rig cost of $4500 in our spreadsheet."

That way their overall math doesn't change. Should get banned for doing things like that. These guys are up to no good.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#350

Post by ADefenestrator » Sat, Mar 14, 2020, 11:14 PM UTC

kllrnohj wrote: post #206

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,…

The buildout in the article doesn't work. You can't plug in that 4-lane SAS SFF-8087 splitter cable into that motherboard. You're only getting 8 hard drives per motherboard with that setup, not 32. That puts the cost of 192 TB at more like $6240‬, not $4945. Could be less if you find a good deal on mini-SAS PCIE cards, but still going to be substantially higher than $4945.

Even if it had slots for the splitter cable, Intel and AMD onboard SATA explicitly doesn't support port multipliers as far as I know. You can buy PCIE SAS cards that do for relatively cheap, but then you have to find board with enough PCIe slots. Easy enough on the "gamer" boards but if you want ECC (and you probably do, for storage) and IPMI (you probably do, if you have more than a few dozen servers) your options get much more limited. Other than 1 or 2 Asrock Rack boards, you pretty much have to move into Epyc 7000-series or Xeon Silver or above. Often dual-socket on the Xeons to get a board with lots of PCIe.

In theory something like an Epyc 3000-series with lots of PCIe or onboard SATA that supports port multipliers would work great, but I don't think anyone actually makes that.