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Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

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Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#611

Post by mrweasel »

pammf wrote: post #604

Real reason is humans are way too optimistic in planning and, for some reason, tend to overlook even more rare, but catastrophic risks. I’m almost sure that the system had some sort of local replication and versioning that was enough to deal with occasional deletions, rollbacks, and single non-widespread hardware failures, so only the very catastrophic scenario of losing all servers at the same time (that for sure wo…

At a previous job I was not allowed to do disaster planning with customers, after I told one of them that it was entirely possible to take out both our datacenters with one plane crash. The two locations where a "safe" distance apart, but where also located fairly close the approach of an airport, and a crashing passenger jet is big enough to take out both buildings.

Apparently I plan for the rather rare catastrophes, and not those customers care about day to day.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#612

Post by swarnie »

rasz wrote: post #558
yongjik wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even worse. According to other articles [1], the total data of "G drive" was 858 TB. It's almost farcical to calculate, but AWS S3 has pricing of about $0.023/GB/month, which means the South Korean government could have reliable multi-storage backup of the whole data at about $20k/month. Or about $900/month if they opted for "Glacier deep archive" tier ($0.00099/GB/month). They did have backup of the data ... in…

>AWS S3 has pricing of about $0.023/GB/month, which means ... about $20k/month or outright buying hardware capable of storing 850TB for the same $20K one time payment. Gives you some perspective on how overpriced AWS is.

Where are you getting 850TB of enterprise storage for $20k?

I had 500TB of object storage priced last year and it came out closer to $300k

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#614

Post by WalterBright »

golem14 wrote: post #595
joshvm wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seagate Expansion drives are in this price range and can be shucked. They're not enterprise drives meant for constant operation, the big ones are Barracudas or maybe Exos, but for homelab NAS they're very popular.

I have such a NAS for 8 years, (and a smaller netgear one from maybe 16 years ago), and have yet such a disk fail. But you can get unlucky, buying a supposedly new but "refurbished" item via amazon or the seagate store (so I hear), or have the equivalent of the "death star" HDDs, which had a ridicilously high burnout rate (we measured something like > 10% of the drives failed every week across a fairly large deployhm…

Only a fool would have 24Tb of data and entrust it to a single drive. Of course you buy more than one.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#616

Post by Blahagun »

audiodude wrote: post #545
3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #397

While I am sure a huge portion of valuable work will be lost, I am smirking thinking of management making a call, "So, if there is any shadow IT who has been running mirror databases of valuable infrastructure, we would have a no questions asked policy on sharing that right now". I know that I have had to keep informal copies of valuable systems because the real source of truth is continually patched,offline,churn,wh…

Reminds me when Toy Story 2 was deleted and they found the backups on an artist's laptop that was working from home.

It was on their SGI workstation that they lugged to home, but yeah, pretty much that's how they recovered most of the files. At the end they barely used the material.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#617

Post by WCSTombs »

nurumaik wrote: post #592
vitorgrs wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you think that the U.S would encrypt gov data and store on Alibaba's Cloud? :)

Why not?

As of today, there's no way to prove the security of any available cryptosystem. Let me say that differently: for all we know, ALL currently available cryptosystems can be easily cracked by some unpublished techniques. The only sort-of exception to that requires quantum communication, which is nowhere near practicability on the scale required. The only evidence we have that the cryptography that we commonly use is actually safe is that it's based on "hard" math problems that have been studied for decades or longer by mathematicians without anyone being able to crack them.

On the other hand, some popular cryptosystems that were more common in the past have been significantly weakened over the years by mathematical advances. Those were also based on math problems that were believed to be "hard." (They're still very hard actually, but less so than we thought.)

What I'm getting at is that if you have some extremely sensitive data that could still be valuable to an adversary after decades, you know, the type of stuff the government of a developed nation might be holding, you probably shouldn't let it get into the hands of an adversarial nation-state even encrypted.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#618

Post by bryanhogan »

sbinnee wrote: post #555

What a sad news as a Korean to see a post about Korea at the top of HN during one of the largest Korean holiday. I can share an anecdote how slow tech adoption is in Korea. It is not exactly about tech in public section but in private companies. I assume public section has slower adoption rate than private ones in general. Just about a year ago I had a couple of projects with insurance companies. I won't name them bu…

I think it's very interesting that Korea is probably the country with the fastest cultural adoption of new tech, e.g. #1 for ChatGPT, but on the other hand I can see as a web developer that new web tech is often adopteded at a very slow rate.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#620

Post by pjmlp »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #568
ciupicri wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nevertheless isn't Joyent registered in the US?

The last time I heard of Joyent was in the mid-2000s on John Gruber’s blog when it was something like a husband-and-wife operation and something to do with WordPress or MovableType - 20 years later now it’s a division of Samsung? My head hurts

In the meantime, they sponsored development of node in its early days, created a could infrastructure based on OpenSolaris and eventually got acquired by Samsung.
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