6 ms·

C14, the Secure Cold Storage Platform, for Free During the Summer

68 points by tusbar 10y ago

pbhjpbhj 10y ago
It seems really cheap, do you think it's sustainable at those prices?
- belorn 10y ago
  From the perspective of sustainable, I can find retail harddrives for about €0.023 per GB (not counting taxes). This site take €0.002 per month, so with a very simplistic view, a harddrive is producing profits after about a year. There is of course many additional costs, and they could also be getting a better deal than current retail prices, but from a pure question of "X+1 customer mean a gain or a loss", I would lean towards sustainable.
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    I'd expect energy costs of a data centre + wages to dwarf the actual HDD costs. A half-hour support call is going to cost something like €10 - for which you need to service 5TB-months of data (ie one month of 5000GB of data at 0.2 euro-cents pays for the support cost in min. wage employees). It's great if this is a sustainable business as I only have 1TB of data at home and probably only a third of that needs backing up. So 4TB-months of data per annum, €8 - that's much cheaper than buying a HDD myself c. £50 [currently €60] which I expect to have c. 5 years of life. Though the A in ADSL then starts getting really annoying.
boulos 10y ago
From their FAQ: > Where is my data stored? > Your data will be stored in our fallout shelter, located 25 meters under the ground in Paris, France, starting in September 2016. So where is it for now? And like Backblaze, a single site storage solution means you should only consider this as an extra backup (not primary storage). There's a note that in September they'll also be expanding to offer multisite, but don't have pricing yet for that (hopefully just 2-3x depending on number of sites) I'm curious about the 40 TB per archive limit. Is that some sort of equivalent to a full back blaze storage pod? I can't imagine an S3/GCS bucket restriction like that, so I'm curious how customers will be expected to work around it. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but not on GCS).
- abermingham 10y ago
  Yes, multi-location will be proposed in September, you will be able to choose each location where you want your archive. The 40TB limit came from the temporary storage plateform who need to be fully provisioned for each active archives. This temporary storage is free of charge, we had to put some limitations to keep reasonable plateform. https://blog.online.net/content/images/2016/07/c14howitworks.png https://blog.online.net/content/images/2016/07/c14howitworks... The backend storage pool (The "C14 cloud") is near unlimited.
  - boulos 10y ago
    Good to know. So what facility are you in currently? And how much bandwidth do you have? (i.e., if I want to get 25 TB out for recovery, how long will that take in the best case?)
    - edouardb 10y ago
      Online DC2, Paris, France http://www.iliad-datacenter.fr/datacenters/dc2 http://www.iliad-datacenter.fr/datacenters/dc2 (French)
    - mikmak 10y ago
      it is expected to take a few hours to un-archive datas as for the bandwidth, we have well enough (we have about 1.5tb/s global external capacity at the moment with various global IXes and many tier1 transits), the C14 platform network itself is designed to scale very easily (10g/40g unit base connections) Mik (Online.net network)
- rsync 10y ago
  "I can't imagine an S3/GCS bucket restriction like that, so I'm curious how customers will be expected to work around it." Amazon S3 has a 5TB object size limit and only 5GB (!) can be uploaded in a single PUT[1]. Different limits, but still something people have to work around. An actual filesystem on ZFS makes all of these limits disappear. Does anyone offer cloud storage based on that ? Man, that would be awesome. [1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/UploadingObjects.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/UploadingObje...
breakingcups 10y ago
Has anyone tried this yet? It seems more than 50% cheaper than Backblaze B2 with a very similar setup.
- edouardb 10y ago
  Try it, it's free for the moment :)
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    You have to open an account with verified bank details first though, right?
sargun 10y ago
Does anyone know about a bare metal provider like Scaleway / Online.net in the US? I have no problem with the EU, other than the speed of light.
- tusbar 10y ago
  Yeah, check https://www.packet.net https://www.packet.net
- boulos 10y ago
  Digital Ocean is arguably kind of close. SoftLayer and Rackspace are the biggest players in this space, but unlike Scaleway there's no way to start at $10/month. Why do you feel like you need bare metal though? Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine, and we don't offer bare metal (so of course I'm trying to sell you on virtualized offerings).
  - reacweb 10y ago
    scaleway is 3.59€ for arm bare metal. I love it ;-)
  - sargun 10y ago
    I'm not really looking for someone like Rackspace. I want someone that lets me easily spin up capacity on demand at pretty low cost. I love compute engine. I run a bunch of nodes on it, but unfortunately it doesn't do nested virtualization. I specifically want to run some virtual box workloads and some other stuff that needs light weight virtualization. I've found a couple virtual server providers that offer nested Virtualization, but not entirely sure how it works. They were also crazy expensive.
tluyben2 10y ago
I have to register my debit/credit card and it refuses with "Error" :) I asked support but that's not a very good start.
- balamaci 10y ago
  Same for me. I wanted to use them two weeks ago but could not get passed it. I just gave up on 3rd card attempt. And btw why can't they support pay-pall? It always makes me uneasy to pass in the credit card details directly on a site.
  - tluyben2 10y ago
    Seems that under the guise of security it seems that sites can leave their payment process to be complete crap (UX/UI, feedback and everything else). I see this far too often; sometimes not even the "Error" appears, just a page reload without any indication. It is not that hard to be clear guys...
- balamaci 10y ago
  Funny thing is that I use Scaleway also, and did not have any problems registering a credit card with them. Since online.net and scaleway seem to be the same or related somehow, maybe they should copy-paste the CC validation code from them or allow login with the same user.
swinglock 10y ago
Why is there a charge for deleting data? If I want to stop using the service or just lower the storage charge, I need to pay for that? Scrubbing I can understand if scrubbing is not mandatory, but deleting should just be marking data as free to overwrite so someone else can be charged.
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  I'm not speaking on behalf of C14 or similar service, but the charge for deleting data isn't very new. Quoting from http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ For objects that are archived to Glacier, there is a pro-rated charge of $0.021 per gigabyte for objects deleted prior to 90 days. Objects that are in Standard – Infrequent Access have a minimum 30 days of storage, and objects that are deleted, overwritten, or transitioned to a different storage class before 30 days incur a pro-rated charge equal to the storage charge for the remaining days. The difference that I see here is that C14 appears to charge for deletion regardless of the access. Maybe it's a way on ensuring income for a certain duration on capacity freed up by way of such deletes.
amaks 10y ago
Do they offer end-to-end encryption? If they use ZFS I assume they should have checksums that detect data corruption.
- mikmak 10y ago
  well kind of yes I guess, protocols to transfer from your side to C14 platform is fully encrypted (SSH/FTPS ...) then it's encrypted by the C14 platform itself to the end-storage backends Mik
  - amaks 10y ago
    I've been primarily concerned if they store data encrypted at rest, with my own key.
    - mikmak 10y ago
      yes every bit is encrypted with AES-256-CBC, we provide the encryption key which you must keep to restore Mik
tehabe 10y ago
I wonder, can you use Carbon-14 to store something? A halflife of 5730±40 years should be fine for now but you should be prepared to copy it on a regular basis …

68 points by tusbar 10y ago

pbhjpbhj 10y ago

It seems really cheap, do you think it's sustainable at those prices?

belorn 10y ago
From the perspective of sustainable, I can find retail harddrives for about €0.023 per GB (not counting taxes). This site take €0.002 per month, so with a very simplistic view, a harddrive is producing profits after about a year. There is of course many additional costs, and they could also be getting a better deal than current retail prices, but from a pure question of "X+1 customer mean a gain or a loss", I would lean towards sustainable.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  I'd expect energy costs of a data centre + wages to dwarf the actual HDD costs. A half-hour support call is going to cost something like €10 - for which you need to service 5TB-months of data (ie one month of 5000GB of data at 0.2 euro-cents pays for the support cost in min. wage employees). It's great if this is a sustainable business as I only have 1TB of data at home and probably only a third of that needs backing up. So 4TB-months of data per annum, €8 - that's much cheaper than buying a HDD myself c. £50 [currently €60] which I expect to have c. 5 years of life. Though the A in ADSL then starts getting really annoying.

boulos 10y ago

From their FAQ: > Where is my data stored? > Your data will be stored in our fallout shelter, located 25 meters under the ground in Paris, France, starting in September 2016. So where is it for now? And like Backblaze, a single site storage solution means you should only consider this as an extra backup (not primary storage). There's a note that in September they'll also be expanding to offer multisite, but don't have pricing yet for that (hopefully just 2-3x depending on number of sites) I'm curious about the 40 TB per archive limit. Is that some sort of equivalent to a full back blaze storage pod? I can't imagine an S3/GCS bucket restriction like that, so I'm curious how customers will be expected to work around it. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but not on GCS).

abermingham 10y ago
Yes, multi-location will be proposed in September, you will be able to choose each location where you want your archive. The 40TB limit came from the temporary storage plateform who need to be fully provisioned for each active archives. This temporary storage is free of charge, we had to put some limitations to keep reasonable plateform. https://blog.online.net/content/images/2016/07/c14howitworks.png https://blog.online.net/content/images/2016/07/c14howitworks... The backend storage pool (The "C14 cloud") is near unlimited.
- boulos 10y ago
  Good to know. So what facility are you in currently? And how much bandwidth do you have? (i.e., if I want to get 25 TB out for recovery, how long will that take in the best case?)
  - edouardb 10y ago
    Online DC2, Paris, France http://www.iliad-datacenter.fr/datacenters/dc2 http://www.iliad-datacenter.fr/datacenters/dc2 (French)
  - mikmak 10y ago
    it is expected to take a few hours to un-archive datas as for the bandwidth, we have well enough (we have about 1.5tb/s global external capacity at the moment with various global IXes and many tier1 transits), the C14 platform network itself is designed to scale very easily (10g/40g unit base connections) Mik (Online.net network)
rsync 10y ago
"I can't imagine an S3/GCS bucket restriction like that, so I'm curious how customers will be expected to work around it." Amazon S3 has a 5TB object size limit and only 5GB (!) can be uploaded in a single PUT[1]. Different limits, but still something people have to work around. An actual filesystem on ZFS makes all of these limits disappear. Does anyone offer cloud storage based on that ? Man, that would be awesome. [1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/UploadingObjects.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/UploadingObje...

breakingcups 10y ago

Has anyone tried this yet? It seems more than 50% cheaper than Backblaze B2 with a very similar setup.

edouardb 10y ago
Try it, it's free for the moment :)
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  You have to open an account with verified bank details first though, right?

sargun 10y ago

Does anyone know about a bare metal provider like Scaleway / Online.net in the US? I have no problem with the EU, other than the speed of light.

tusbar 10y ago
Yeah, check https://www.packet.net https://www.packet.net
boulos 10y ago
Digital Ocean is arguably kind of close. SoftLayer and Rackspace are the biggest players in this space, but unlike Scaleway there's no way to start at $10/month. Why do you feel like you need bare metal though? Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine, and we don't offer bare metal (so of course I'm trying to sell you on virtualized offerings).
- reacweb 10y ago
  scaleway is 3.59€ for arm bare metal. I love it ;-)
- sargun 10y ago
  I'm not really looking for someone like Rackspace. I want someone that lets me easily spin up capacity on demand at pretty low cost. I love compute engine. I run a bunch of nodes on it, but unfortunately it doesn't do nested virtualization. I specifically want to run some virtual box workloads and some other stuff that needs light weight virtualization. I've found a couple virtual server providers that offer nested Virtualization, but not entirely sure how it works. They were also crazy expensive.

tluyben2 10y ago

I have to register my debit/credit card and it refuses with "Error" :) I asked support but that's not a very good start.

balamaci 10y ago
Same for me. I wanted to use them two weeks ago but could not get passed it. I just gave up on 3rd card attempt. And btw why can't they support pay-pall? It always makes me uneasy to pass in the credit card details directly on a site.
- tluyben2 10y ago
  Seems that under the guise of security it seems that sites can leave their payment process to be complete crap (UX/UI, feedback and everything else). I see this far too often; sometimes not even the "Error" appears, just a page reload without any indication. It is not that hard to be clear guys...
balamaci 10y ago
Funny thing is that I use Scaleway also, and did not have any problems registering a credit card with them. Since online.net and scaleway seem to be the same or related somehow, maybe they should copy-paste the CC validation code from them or allow login with the same user.

swinglock 10y ago

Why is there a charge for deleting data? If I want to stop using the service or just lower the storage charge, I need to pay for that? Scrubbing I can understand if scrubbing is not mandatory, but deleting should just be marking data as free to overwrite so someone else can be charged.

0xmohit 10y ago
I'm not speaking on behalf of C14 or similar service, but the charge for deleting data isn't very new. Quoting from http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ For objects that are archived to Glacier, there is a pro-rated charge of $0.021 per gigabyte for objects deleted prior to 90 days. Objects that are in Standard – Infrequent Access have a minimum 30 days of storage, and objects that are deleted, overwritten, or transitioned to a different storage class before 30 days incur a pro-rated charge equal to the storage charge for the remaining days. The difference that I see here is that C14 appears to charge for deletion regardless of the access. Maybe it's a way on ensuring income for a certain duration on capacity freed up by way of such deletes.

amaks 10y ago

Do they offer end-to-end encryption? If they use ZFS I assume they should have checksums that detect data corruption.

mikmak 10y ago
well kind of yes I guess, protocols to transfer from your side to C14 platform is fully encrypted (SSH/FTPS ...) then it's encrypted by the C14 platform itself to the end-storage backends Mik
- amaks 10y ago
  I've been primarily concerned if they store data encrypted at rest, with my own key.
  - mikmak 10y ago
    yes every bit is encrypted with AES-256-CBC, we provide the encryption key which you must keep to restore Mik

tehabe 10y ago

I wonder, can you use Carbon-14 to store something? A halflife of 5730±40 years should be fine for now but you should be prepared to copy it on a regular basis …