61–70 of 393 posts
I had a quick skim through the marketing stuff and the FAQs and didn't see anywhere that actually details what the backend of this is. I'd be curious if they're actually using tape, older machines, Backblaze pods, etc. I guess if it's the latter, the time to recover could be an artificial barrier to prevent people from getting cute.
What does "99.999999999% durability" mean? Does it mean they allow themselves to lose one byte per terabyte on average?
From: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#How_durable_is_Amazon_S3 Amazon S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability of objects over a given year. This durability level corresponds to an average annual expected loss of 0.000000001% of objects. For example, if you store 10,000 objects with Amazon S3, you can on average expect to incur a loss of a single object once every 10,000,000 years....
This is a really good offering for media that you typically will keep locally for instant access, yet you want to have an off-site backup in a way that lives for a very long time. Dropbox should work here, but it's simply too expensive. My photo library is 175GB. That isn't excessive when considering I store the digital negatives and this represents over a decade. I don't mind not being able to access it for a few ho…
Perhaps DropBox et al will be able to make use of this Infrastructure to lower the costs of their service...
One recurrent issue with Amazon services is that they charge in US$ and currently do not accept euros. European banks charge an arm and a leg for micropayment conversions: last time I got a bill from AWS for 0.02$ it ended up costing me 20 euros or so. Pretty much kills the deal. One solution could be to pre-pay 100$ on an account and let them debit as needed.
It's a bit strange how S3 has a 'US Standard' region option, while Glacier has the usual set of regions (US East, US West, etc). I wonder if this means that unlike S3, Glacier isn't replicated across regions?
US Standard isn't replicated across regions.
> The US Standard Region automatically routes requests to facilities in Northern Virginia or the Pacific Northwest using network maps.
I guess this means that the data is automatically geographically sharded?
This is a really good offering for media that you typically will keep locally for instant access, yet you want to have an off-site backup in a way that lives for a very long time. Dropbox should work here, but it's simply too expensive. My photo library is 175GB. That isn't excessive when considering I store the digital negatives and this represents over a decade. I don't mind not being able to access it for a few ho…
Perhaps DropBox et al will be able to make use of this Infrastructure to lower the costs of their service...
What I find fascinating with Amazon's infrastructure push is the the successful 'homonymization' of their brand name Amazon. Amazon simultaneously stands for ecommerce and web infrastructure depending on the context. e.g "Hey I want to host my server".. "Why don't you try Amazon". "Do you know where I can get a fair priced laptop?" "Check Amazon". Is there any other brand that has done this successfully? Edit: I shou…
Mitsubishi and Samsung springs to mind as two of the best known ones internationally where their brands are known in multiple markets internationally, though many of their businesses are less known outside Asia (e.g. Mitsubishi's bank is Japans largest). Any number of other Asian conglomerates.
ITT used to fall in that category back in the day: Fridges, PC's, hotels, insurance, schools,telecoms and lots more. I remember we at one point had both an ITT PC and fridge. The name was well known in many of its markets.
The large, sprawling, unfocused conglomerate have fallen a bit out of favor in Europe and the US. ITT was often criticized for their lack of focus even back in the 80's, and have since broken itself into more and more pieces and renamed and/or sold off many of them (e.g. the hotel group is now owned by Starwood).
This is a really good offering for media that you typically will keep locally for instant access, yet you want to have an off-site backup in a way that lives for a very long time. Dropbox should work here, but it's simply too expensive. My photo library is 175GB. That isn't excessive when considering I store the digital negatives and this represents over a decade. I don't mind not being able to access it for a few ho…
"In the coming months, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) plans to introduce an option that will allow you to seamlessly move data between Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier using data lifecycle policies."
This is a really good offering for media that you typically will keep locally for instant access, yet you want to have an off-site backup in a way that lives for a very long time. Dropbox should work here, but it's simply too expensive. My photo library is 175GB. That isn't excessive when considering I store the digital negatives and this represents over a decade. I don't mind not being able to access it for a few ho…
edit: emphasis formatting, niceifying.
And while not super-duper expensive, s3 provides much more than I really need, and hence a more limited (but cheaper) service would definitely be appreciated.
If there is anything with the easy of use like s3cmd to accompany this service I will be switching in a heartbeat.