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Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

blog.sia.tech

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Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#41

Post by vikiomega9 »

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…

> exabyte-scale storage system

Somewhat of a random question, can you point me to some state of the art research?

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#42

Post by eyegor »

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.

It's outrageously low. They're also fancifully assuming cpu tdp = electrical power, cooling = 0w, and another 0w to the motherboard/network cards. And each box has 1 non-redundant, schmuck-grade $80 psu, as well as a consumer grade mobo. This would never be anywhere near their uptime.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#43

Post by jrockway »

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…

I think it's interesting to dive into the economics of 95% uptime. Maybe you don't need full datacenter cooling; you can just locate in a cool climate and have a fan in the window blowing cold air in. If there's a blizzard, you lose your drives because snow blows in and melts on your drives. If the chance of the blizzard * price of drives is less than needing 750W of cooling, then you win. Yeah, sometimes everything shorts out.

Power is similar. Maybe you just use solar and turn the drives off when it's cloudy. With enough distribution throughout the world, it will probably be sunny somewhere.

I haven't done the math and I'm not saying it will work out favorably. I also don't have a use case for 95% availability. (That's two weeks a year where your data is gone!) But it's something that someone with the right needs could consider, and maybe come out ahead of someone shooting for 5 nines and drives that aren't covered in snow.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#44

Post by wmf »

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…

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.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#46

Post by walrus01 »

jrockway wrote: post #43
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…

I think it's interesting to dive into the economics of 95% uptime. Maybe you don't need full datacenter cooling; you can just locate in a cool climate and have a fan in the window blowing cold air in. If there's a blizzard, you lose your drives because snow blows in and melts on your drives. If the chance of the blizzard * price of drives is less than needing 750W of cooling, then you win. Yeah, sometimes everything…

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.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#47

Post by Taek »

mjb wrote: post #16

The IO operations amplification for 64 of 96 is pretty brutal, and particularly unfavorable in a world where capacity-per-IOPS keeps trending up. I wonder how they'll deal with that.

Each of the 64 pieces is fetched from a different host on the network, meaning all of the IOPS are happening in parallel at network speeds. You aren't going to be doing sub-millisecond updates for sure, but you can easily get under 100ms.

The reed-solomon also isn't even the most computationally expensive part, the computationally expensive part is computing and verifying the Merkle roots. All parts of the system though can go >1gbps on standard CPUs.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#48

Post by pedrocr »

Kliment wrote: post #40
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.

From what I can see on the website that block storage consists of SSDs priced at ~50€/month/TB which is a non-starter. The cloud instances are incredibly cheap though, I may have a look at those.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#49

Post by Taek »

standardUser wrote: post #4

On a related topic, I've had a ton of problems finding a cloud storage system that will reliably handle files around 100-200gb. Does anyone have a recommendation for a service that can handle that file size with ease?

Sia, the system described above, comfortably handles files of 100-200 gb, and with the recent Skynet link also enables filesharing for files up to 400 GB.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#50

Post by atsmyles »

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

According to your link, backblaze hardware costs are around 10x cheaper than OP's estimate. $2.56 per TB (based on .05 per GB) vs $25 per TB.
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