3 ms·

Your math is flawed. Realize that, for what Amazon charges currently, you can buy an equivalent 1TB disk drive every single month. You forget that disks fail.

by moe 17y ago

Your math is flawed. Realize that, for what Amazon charges currently, you can buy an equivalent 1TB disk drive every single month. You forget that disks fail. You forget that you always have to buy them in pairs for availability. You forget that someone has to be there (physically) to swap them. You forget that storage arrays that can truly scale seamlessly (akin to the experience EBS gives you) cost a fortune, not to mention the accompanying fibre channel infrastructure. You forget that maintaining a large scale Xen deployment is non-trivial (hint: there are companies making a living only of that!). In short, you forget many things that bite large chunks out of your imaginary generator/party budget.

thaumaturgy 17y ago
You're right, my math was flawed, though possibly not in the way you were implying, because: I added a T1 ($250/month) to a building rental ($2000/month), and then said that they'd have $10,000/month left over. Why would I do such a thing? Why, so that: They could upgrade to redundant DS3s (or better!) They could buy extra drives! They could pay someone to live within a few miles and carry a cell phone that accepts text messages! ...etc. Doubly funny, to me, is that "disk failure" is being mentioned in the comments on an article about how all of their disks failed all at once. So, no, I certainly did not forget about disk failure. Indeed it's one of the reasons that I'd rather not host certain things as EC2 instances. As far as scalability: Well, how far would 67TB carry you? Because you could deploy 67TB every single month and still have money left over. [1] To get to the meat of my argument: I think that what's both great and horrible about EC2-like services is that they allow programmers to deploy Really Big Things without having to employ or deal with system administrators. As a result, it's a solution that's being misapplied in some cases. [1]: http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/ http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-h... -- it even has pretty pictures
- moe 17y ago
  Well, I've been doing the infrastructure thing for a living for a while and it's always half amusing, half worrying to see comments like this. So, no, I certainly did not forget about disk failure. Indeed it's one of the reasons that I'd rather not host certain things as EC2 instances. I was mentioning disk failure as part of ongoing maintenance, which is a different thing to a once-in-a-year blackout that you (as the reseller of the service) don't have to debug and recover or actively protect against. As far as scalability: Well, how far would 67TB carry you? See, that's where the amusement starts. A service like heroku it would probably carry not very far. Their service is not about storage. The backblaze gives you 45 spindles for cheap. 45 spindles translate to roughly 4500 IOPS. That's a significant rate. It's also a rate that a few database intensive customers can exceed with ease. Now you're suddenly in an entirely different game called "Storage Engineering". It's about things like balancing IO hotspots, redundant data paths and many other pesky little details that were not exactly your core business in first place. You sure can scale out with backblaze, but it's rather unlikely that you can do it for cheaper than what amazon has on offer (economies of scale, y'know) because scaling IOPS is quite a bit harder than scaling capacity. Here's a quiz for you: Why do you think none of the cloud providers other than amazon has an offer anywhere near the flexibility/price of EBS?
  - ericd 17y ago
    I'm curious, how do the Intel X25-E's change the IOPS scaling challenge?

by moe 17y ago

thaumaturgy 17y ago

You're right, my math was flawed, though possibly not in the way you were implying, because: I added a T1 ($250/month) to a building rental ($2000/month), and then said that they'd have $10,000/month left over. Why would I do such a thing? Why, so that: They could upgrade to redundant DS3s (or better!) They could buy extra drives! They could pay someone to live within a few miles and carry a cell phone that accepts text messages! ...etc. Doubly funny, to me, is that "disk failure" is being mentioned in the comments on an article about how all of their disks failed all at once. So, no, I certainly did not forget about disk failure. Indeed it's one of the reasons that I'd rather not host certain things as EC2 instances. As far as scalability: Well, how far would 67TB carry you? Because you could deploy 67TB every single month and still have money left over. [1] To get to the meat of my argument: I think that what's both great and horrible about EC2-like services is that they allow programmers to deploy Really Big Things without having to employ or deal with system administrators. As a result, it's a solution that's being misapplied in some cases. [1]: http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/ http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-h... -- it even has pretty pictures

moe 17y ago
Well, I've been doing the infrastructure thing for a living for a while and it's always half amusing, half worrying to see comments like this. So, no, I certainly did not forget about disk failure. Indeed it's one of the reasons that I'd rather not host certain things as EC2 instances. I was mentioning disk failure as part of ongoing maintenance, which is a different thing to a once-in-a-year blackout that you (as the reseller of the service) don't have to debug and recover or actively protect against. As far as scalability: Well, how far would 67TB carry you? See, that's where the amusement starts. A service like heroku it would probably carry not very far. Their service is not about storage. The backblaze gives you 45 spindles for cheap. 45 spindles translate to roughly 4500 IOPS. That's a significant rate. It's also a rate that a few database intensive customers can exceed with ease. Now you're suddenly in an entirely different game called "Storage Engineering". It's about things like balancing IO hotspots, redundant data paths and many other pesky little details that were not exactly your core business in first place. You sure can scale out with backblaze, but it's rather unlikely that you can do it for cheaper than what amazon has on offer (economies of scale, y'know) because scaling IOPS is quite a bit harder than scaling capacity. Here's a quiz for you: Why do you think none of the cloud providers other than amazon has an offer anywhere near the flexibility/price of EBS?
- ericd 17y ago
  I'm curious, how do the Intel X25-E's change the IOPS scaling challenge?