Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day • Hacker News Board

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#51

Post by darklajid » Thu, Mar 22, 2012, 9:07 PM UTC

jneal wrote: post #46

What's the big deal? Just delete the data. Customer pays for storage. Company stores. Customer stops paying for storage. Company deletes. Sure, a bunch of pissed off people will certainly be upset - but it's not the company's fault - they shouldn't have to bear this burden. I can't see how they could be sued by users for this, they didn't enter into any kind of agreement with the users, only with the customer.

Thing is - the company stopped paying because a couple of cowboys are currently checking if the town is big enough for them both.

Users don't care about that. Yes, some users are totally legitimate. Dropping their data because someone, somewhere thinks that the original service in general was 'evil' is not a solution that is as straight-cut as you'd like to present it.

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#52

Post by grecy » Thu, Mar 22, 2012, 9:08 PM UTC

xymostech wrote: post #19

anon808 wrote: post #6

It sucks, but that's the price of doing business. They chose their customer, and now are (unfortunately) tied to consequences. Same thing happens to building owners who have a crime committed by a tenant, the leased space becomes a crime scene until the police/govt are done with their investigation.

But instead of just losing use of those servers, they have to actively maintain them. It looks like they just want someone to pay for the $9000 per day that it costs to keep the servers running, they aren't looking for money that they lost from not being able to use the servers. To go with your analogy, sure building owners aren't allowed to rent the space back out, but they most certainly not asked to pay for usual…

The building owners have to continue to pay property tax, condo fees and maintenance costs like security, gardeners and window cleaners.

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#53

Post by rmc » Thu, Mar 22, 2012, 9:08 PM UTC

jneal wrote: post #46

What's the big deal? Just delete the data. Customer pays for storage. Company stores. Customer stops paying for storage. Company deletes. Sure, a bunch of pissed off people will certainly be upset - but it's not the company's fault - they shouldn't have to bear this burden. I can't see how they could be sued by users for this, they didn't enter into any kind of agreement with the users, only with the customer.

The customer (MegaUpload) would like to continue to pay for the storage, they have been prevent by a third party (the government).

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#54

Post by rmc » Thu, Mar 22, 2012, 9:11 PM UTC

firefoxman1 wrote: post #30

I know any legitimate hosting company would never do this, but it would be amazing if they just "happened" to have very loose security on the servers that hold Megaupload's data, and if some hacker were to..."gain unauthorized access" and wipe all the data. They wouldn't be held responsible for a breakin, would they?

If a court orders them to take "reasonable, and industry best practice computer security approaches to prevent the data being lost", then, yes, they would be responsible for "accidentally-on-purpose" leaving the servers accessible. If it were to happen, someone would do a post-mortem, find out that they intended for it to be broken into, and then they would be guilty of contempt of court/destroying evidence/etc.

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#55

Post by nknight » Thu, Mar 22, 2012, 9:13 PM UTC

moonboots wrote: post #20

DanBC wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that pre- or post- Thailand flooding prices? (Have drive prices settled down again?) And is there any redundancy included in your figures? (25 petabytes / 135 terabytes == about 190 pods)

Backblaze quoted this price before the flood at $120 for 3TB. I'm not sure if post-flood prices are back to these prices or what range of prices you can expect at this volume. This figure doesn't include redundancy. Backblaze uses raid6, so the usable capacity is actually 117TB per pod[1]. With this configuration the final cost should be closer to $1.6 million. [1] http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2341206…

> $120 for 3TB

So even if you throw out the rest of the hardware and have zero redundancy, $40/TB * 25000 terabytes = $1,000,000.

(Of course, somebody has to ship and store over 8,000 HDDs, too.)

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#56

Post by rmc » Thu, Mar 22, 2012, 9:13 PM UTC

jakejake wrote: post #12

I can definitely understand the lost potential revenue of having unused servers. But I wonder why they are saying that cost includes power and connectivity for the servers? Seems like they would be powered down. I would actually have assumed the servers to be confiscated and taken off-premise by the FBI.

It is possible that all the incriminating evidence, i.e. the harddrives, are encrypted, but now are mounted and are hence decrypted. Pull the power and you might need someone (who might be outside the USA court's reach) to enter the password.

Pull the power and maybe all the evidence goes away...

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#57

Post by jlawer » Thu, Mar 22, 2012, 9:15 PM UTC

bshep wrote: post #38

jlawer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to pull 1,103 server's disks? The compatibility problems you have trying to get data off a disks in a hardware raid make it impractical (do you have the EXACT SAME version hardware revision & firmware; without this you can't guarantee you can read it back)? Its either that or you have to pay data recovery guys to rebuild it. Not to mention hard drive costs are still high, post thai floods. For enterprise gea…

Well as I said the could do it piecemeal (10 servers at a time or what have you) and it would require that the data (harware/versions/etc) for the source machine be archived with the disks. (good cataloguing) Also $286K / $9k / day ~= 32 days, so in 32 days it costs them more to keep it all running that simply replace the disks. Not to mention they could now lease those servers to another client and make money off of…

Yeah, I think you would also consider that with a fairly standard equipment lifecycle program you would have 1/3rd to 1/4 of the equipment up for renewal in the next 12 months. Maybe you bring that renewal forward... and maybe you spec some nicer hardware (new Xeon E-5, etc) and are able to get a better consolidation happening so you don't replace everything.

I just wonder if they would be in a better financial position declaring it a loss and claiming the tax break / insurance then actually doing the work?

As long as they can support the hit to the cashflow, they are likely to be able to claim the damages back from either one of the parties of the case once its decided and / or insurance.

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#58

Post by firefoxman1 » Thu, Mar 22, 2012, 9:16 PM UTC

rmc wrote: post #54

firefoxman1 wrote: post #30

I know any legitimate hosting company would never do this, but it would be amazing if they just "happened" to have very loose security on the servers that hold Megaupload's data, and if some hacker were to..."gain unauthorized access" and wipe all the data. They wouldn't be held responsible for a breakin, would they?

If a court orders them to take "reasonable, and industry best practice computer security approaches to prevent the data being lost", then, yes, they would be responsible for "accidentally-on-purpose" leaving the servers accessible. If it were to happen, someone would do a post-mortem, find out that they intended for it to be broken into, and then they would be guilty of contempt of court/destroying evidence/etc.

Yeah, realistically it just wouldn't be worth it. But it's fun to imagine.

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#59

Post by georgemcbay » Thu, Mar 22, 2012, 9:17 PM UTC

gwern wrote: post #47

av500 wrote: post #42

Are there seriously people that used Megaupload as their sole and only place to store their data? What if there was a fire in the server room? Or some MU intern typed rm -rf /?

Believe it or not, there are even people who don't have backups at all. I know, right?

Not backing up your important data is passive stupidity.

Backing up your data on Megaupload and then not keeping a local copy is active stupidity of such vast scale that I refuse to believe it has ever happened in the real world.

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#60

Post by darklajid » Thu, Mar 22, 2012, 9:19 PM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #41

nextparadigms wrote: post #25

This is why the US Government shouldn't have seized the site first, and asked questions later. They should've filed a trial against them, and let them keep hosting the data, and if found guilty, then take it down.

I agree, standard operating procedure when dealing with digital information should always include a generous window for destruction of evidence.

I disagree. Servers should be inaccessible, but not at all accessed by the law enforcement agency coming up with claims in court - why would they need to look at that amount of data anyway and why should tax payers suffer.

Just - put them behind bars. I said so.