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They're not talking about a datacenter. Datacenters need to be reliable. Sia storage pools don't, because security and reliability is achieved at the global net
by Ajedi32 7y ago
They're not talking about a datacenter. Datacenters need to be reliable. Sia storage pools don't, because security and reliability is achieved at the global network level, not at the level of individual systems or storage pools. 95% reliability means you can be down for two whole weeks out of every year and still be well within acceptable uptime requirements.
Generators? Who needs those? Just wait for the power to come back on. UPS? Why bother? Square footage? Stick some wooden shelves in the cheapest building possible. Cooling? Locate in a cold climate and buy some window fans.
This isn't anything like the sort of infrastructure you're used to dealing with. Think Bitcoin mining farm, not Backblaze datacenter. Any corners that can be cut will be.
- throwaway3157 7y agoWho are the customers for such unreliable systems?
- Ajedi32 7y agoSia is very reliable from the customer's perspective. Its only individual systems and storage pools that have lax uptime requirements. Thanks to some clever network-level redundancy mechanisms (10-of-30 redundancy), 95% uptime at the storage pool level translates to 99.9999% uptime from the customer's perspective. See the "Uptime Math" section in the OP for details.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- system2 7y agoIt is not the answer to the question above. What is the type of customer uses this company?
- ericflo 7y agoUsers of Sia are the customers. So your question reduces to: who uses Sia? It used to mostly be interesting for customers interested in reliable large-file data backup on the cheap, but now it has expanded to customers looking to do content distribution on the web, etc.
- samstave 7y agoShady neckbeards. Seriously, the type of people with the scruples which would piss you off both in their tactics and their profits. Lest we forget where the fuck FB, Myspace, Friendster, HI5 all came from: unscrupulous spamsters etc.. many made lots of money, but they’re still douchey in their inceptions...
- ac29 7y agoWhen you says Sia is reliable, do you mean it could be reliable if hypothetical X, Y, and Z things happen? Because according to the homepage (sia.tech) there are only 895 hosts storing a total of 206TB right now, which is a very, very small amount. Backblaze, a relatively small player as compared to the big cloud providers has 1.1 million TB of raw capacity as of last year (redundancy reduces the available capacity, but still) [0]. [0] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2019/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2019/
- Ajedi32 7y agoBy reliable in this context I mean robust against hardware failure. (Including the failure of entire storage sites.) The OP explains the math and associated assumptions for how they derived that "99.9999%" figure, and acknowledges that since the calculated chance of data loss due to hardware failure is so infinitesimally small, other failure modes outside of what they modeled are likely to dominate. As for the relatively small number of hosts at present, 895 is more than enough for 10-of-30 redundancy to work "as advertised". You really only need 30 hosts technically. The bigger issue I think is the relative immaturity of the software. Sia is still pretty new compared to most other data storage systems; and although I've never heard of any software bugs in Sia resulting in data loss, that doesn't mean such a bug will never be discovered. Be cautious, keep backups, and never rely on any single storage medium to store your data.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- SrslyJosh 7y agoI'll pass, thanks.
- qes 7y ago> Think Bitcoin mining farm, not Backblaze datacenter. Any corners that can be cut will be. And yet Sia is about half the cost of Backblaze (i.e. not much savings). Hard to imagine situations where this is a good trade-off.