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UC Berkeley will delete all alumni email accounts with >5GB stored

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Re: UC Berkeley will delete all alumni email accounts with >5GB stored

#51

Post by dekhn »

samstave wrote: post #11
skissane wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (Although I think @berkeley.edu is likely the most famous .edu? (because of BSD and all the man pages?)) Your average random is more likely to have heard of Harvard or MIT than Berkeley I’m Australian. I think most educated Australians have heard of Harvard. You don’t even have to be “educated”, maybe you just saw The Social Network (or one of several other popular films featuring Harvard). How many Australians hav…

Just read email wiki -- didnt realize Eric Schmidt (goog) was the creater of berknet in 1978 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berknet

he also wrote lex

Re: UC Berkeley will delete all alumni email accounts with >5GB stored

#52

Post by xyst »

Berkeley appears to offload email, calendar, and other services to Google workspace. A quick dig of MX records for Berkeley.edu show Google mail servers.

Google has been raising the rates of the workspace products every year it seems. I was originally using “G Suite” just for email and it used to cost $3-4/user/month. Now it’s costing me $7-8 per month on Google Workspace.

I suspect the provost or uni president cut the IT budget and this is an unfortunate result.

Re: UC Berkeley will delete all alumni email accounts with >5GB stored

#53

Post by hooverd »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #43
manav wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their email systems are managed by Google Workspace.

Then the obvious solution is to instead have them managed by their CS department. And fire whoever previously thought it should be otherwise.

They would probably crack down on storage more if they had to run their own storage arrays.

Re: UC Berkeley will delete all alumni email accounts with >5GB stored

#54

Post by AnthonyMouse »

fn-mote wrote: post #47
cheepin wrote: post #17

Here's why: https://bconnected.berkeley.edu/projects/google-cost-reducti... TLDR: Google Workspace for Education rug pulled schools on their "unlimited" plans, and the deadline is coming up to avoid paying extra fees. This was communicated in advance, but maybe still a bit quick for a large institution

This is it 100%. > From: (Jan 2023) We currently store 12.4 PB of data across all Google services, and our new storage cap, without significant additional fees, is 1.9 PB. See the timeline [1]. They have been forcing the rest of the university to reduce their usage. Finally it's time for alumni. There's no need for a fuss on HN about this. There's a lot more belt tightening across the university. I'm not seeing the l…

The cost of 12,400TB of storage is on the order of $100,000. UC Berkeley has an annual budget of over $3,000,000,000, i.e. this is 0.003% of their annual budget. Also, it's Berkeley, they probably have that kind of hardware sitting around. They should just stop using Google services.

Re: UC Berkeley will delete all alumni email accounts with >5GB stored

#55

Post by AnthonyMouse »

hooverd wrote: post #53
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the obvious solution is to instead have them managed by their CS department. And fire whoever previously thought it should be otherwise.

They would probably crack down on storage more if they had to run their own storage arrays.

Why? 5GB of storage is like five cents of storage.

Re: UC Berkeley will delete all alumni email accounts with >5GB stored

#56

Post by david38 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #43
manav wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their email systems are managed by Google Workspace.

Then the obvious solution is to instead have them managed by their CS department. And fire whoever previously thought it should be otherwise.

You can’t be serious? I can’t think of a bigger waste of time.

Re: UC Berkeley will delete all alumni email accounts with >5GB stored

#57

Post by AnthonyMouse »

david38 wrote: post #56
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the obvious solution is to instead have them managed by their CS department. And fire whoever previously thought it should be otherwise.

You can’t be serious? I can’t think of a bigger waste of time.

For the people who write the SMTP RFCs and teach students how to implement them to have hands-on experience operating a mail system?

Re: UC Berkeley will delete all alumni email accounts with >5GB stored

#58

Post by tredre3 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #54
fn-mote wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is it 100%. > From: (Jan 2023) We currently store 12.4 PB of data across all Google services, and our new storage cap, without significant additional fees, is 1.9 PB. See the timeline [1]. They have been forcing the rest of the university to reduce their usage. Finally it's time for alumni. There's no need for a fuss on HN about this. There's a lot more belt tightening across the university. I'm not seeing the l…

The cost of 12,400TB of storage is on the order of $100,000. UC Berkeley has an annual budget of over $3,000,000,000, i.e. this is 0.003% of their annual budget. Also, it's Berkeley, they probably have that kind of hardware sitting around. They should just stop using Google services.

You're grossly underestimating the cost. With some amount of redundancy and growth that would be 24TB of drive capacity at least. You're looking at $250k in drives alone. You also need almost 100 servers to host that many drives, so another $250k. Then they'd have to pay maybe $500k/yr for three sysadmins (including benefits). Then some amount for tape backups, connectivity, electricity, maintenance.

Perhaps still peanuts for UC Berkeley and worth it, I don't know, but it's not just writing a 100k check.

Re: UC Berkeley will delete all alumni email accounts with >5GB stored

#60

Post by redserk »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #57
david38 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t be serious? I can’t think of a bigger waste of time.

For the people who write the SMTP RFCs and teach students how to implement them to have hands-on experience operating a mail system?

This wouldn't be RFC work, this would be sysadmin work.

Probably not the worst use of time, but you'd need to find interested students and faculty year-over-year.

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