15 ms·

Show HN: Zfs.rent

403 points by ryanmjacobs 6y ago

atmosx 6y ago
I wish I had the upstream to consider a similar service.
sneak 6y ago
This seems to expose a common misconception among ZFS people (and one I previously erroneously harbored) that an SLOG device is useful on a remote machine (that you are not connected to via nfs). It is not. It is useful for synchronous writes only, such as those done by a local database server, or remotely via NFS. If you’re just sshing in to send data, an SLOG device is a waste.
- mkj 6y ago
  You mean "sshing in to 'zfs send' data" won't need a SLOG? That's a good point. This zfs.rent server lets you run local programs too on it, so SLOG would help there.
  - seized 6y ago
    But again, only if whatever you are running does sync writes to storage. Many things will never benefit from or even use a SLOG. A SLOG on a pool doing async writes doesn't get used. So maybe some databases or some specific apps, but whatever you'd run in a 4GM RAM KVM won't be much.
londons_explore 6y ago
Will you actually make money from this? It seems like you might have added up your costs, but not left any room to pay for your hours, unused capacity, unpaid bills, overheads, profit, etc.
- dewey 6y ago
  I guess this is done through the traffic costs? 1TB included, each additional $5/TB which is probably higher than the "real" cost of the traffic.
  - diggan 6y ago
    > probably higher than the "real" cost of the traffic Hopefully the project is setup in a way so it avoids the scam AWS et al does with charging for "premium" bandwidth, meaning the cost of the bandwidth should either be a static sum each month, way cheaper or free.
    - dewey 6y ago
      "Free" or "Unlimited" bandwidth always feels worse to me than charging the appropriate amount as you know there's a limit somewhere. No such thing as unlimited bandwidth.
      - diggan 6y ago
        I agree with charging the "appropriate amount", but that's not what AWS and the other hosting providers are offering though. They are offering you a price that is vastly different than what it actually costs. Instead hosts like Hetzner and OVH uses a price closer to the true cost for bandwidth for their users. Take a look at their dedicated hosting and the pricing. I'm not sponsored by either, but I am a happy user of Hetzner. Check out this talk by Kyle Drake that goes more into the details of bandwidth costs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i6wvix6buI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i6wvix6buI
        dewey 6y ago
        Agreed on the bandwidth costs from GCP/AWS. I’m a happy customer of OVH for a decade already and their pricing seems closer to reality.
      - progval 6y ago
        I've been renting servers at Scaleway Dedibox (formerly Online.net) for years, with free unlimited bandwidth. I can be pretty bandwidth-intensive for a few weeks at a time (eg. rebalancing a storage cluster) and never had any trouble.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- GauntletWizard 6y ago
  That’s my concern. I would 100% sign up at this price, but I’m doing the math in my head: They offer 4GB VMs; Assuming they’re oversold and using a good backblaze-pod like design, they can fit ~32 drives per U. 32 * $5/mo is $160; Assuming they’re paying $50/U and the customer’s guaranteed bandwidth is included in their colo cost, that gives them $110 gross margin. Cost of drives is retail - If they have a better supplier that’s a few $ more, but not a lot. The hardware to run that is another real cost. I doubt it costs less than $2000/U to outfit the hardware; It doesn’t have to be beefy but SATA slots add up. That gives a payoff time of ~18 months. Doable, but not amazing. At a scale of a few dozen racks, this could be a lifestyle business, but it’s sorta marginally so. Assuming a hardware lifetime of 3 years, you start breaking even halfway in. Lifetime margin is about the cost of the hardware - $2000/u. If this is a single man show, about 2 racks (= ~3000 customers) gives a reasonable “salary”, but the upfront costs are high.
codetrotter 6y ago
This is pretty attractive to me. One thing I am wondering is, do you offer some sort of simple status panel where I can see the amount of data transfer that I have used for the month? Also, another thing. I might want to use this service for storing copies of important data that I download from the net. But rather than first downloading it to my own computer and then sending it to your servers, does the account on your servers have a shell so that I can run for example wget directly on the server and is it able to connect to arbitrary remote IP or only to whitelisted IP addresses? Also, your page lists IPv4 but not IPv6. Any word on IPv6?
- jsjohnst 6y ago
  > Also, your page lists IPv4 but not IPv6. Any word on IPv6? You could use TunnelBroker.net on top to get IPv6 if they don’t offer it and your use case requires it.
- radious_co 6y ago
  Hi! We are currently working on a _simple_ account management portal backed by our PostgreSQL instance. This will print out a monthly table with your bandwidth usage/quota and provide a Web Interface + API to purchase more bandwidth, add drives, etc. Our design is API first, with a simple wrapper around the API as our Web UI. They both will be well-documented and functionally the same. This Hacker News soft launch was mainly to see if we could generate enough users to purchase a second and third server and scale-out. And by the looks of it, we can! --- As for downloading large files directly to the instance, I'm with you 100%. That's exactly one one of the use cases. (I'm looking at you: massive linux ISOs and +30 GB Xilinx toolchains.) Personally, I like to download them first to a remote machine (takes about 5-10 minutes for 30 GB) and slowly rsync them to my local dev machine with `rsync --partial --bwlimit=10M`. Think of this service as $5/month DigitalOcean VPS, but it happens to have a hefty native storage unit passed through. You can SSH into it and do whatever you want with it. In fact, you don't even have to run ZFS. You could run any filesystem -- EXT4, XFS, BTRFS, etc. Compute-wise, it's not going to be anything groundbreaking -- just a 16-core Ryzen 3700 with a couple of cores passed through to you. Ryzen CPUs support ECC and are still priced as consumer-CPUs which is fantastic. The nice thing about KVM is that even if you don't explicity allocate CPU resources, if the guest machine needs to burst compute, it will "Steal time" from the hypervisor as long as there is extra headroom. This isn't the case with RAM. (For RAM, whatever you set, that is the hard maximum limit.)
3np 6y ago
Love the idea, will consider it and hope it works out for you. Two things: * What does the 20 mbps / 1gbps capacity indicate? How is this former number derived? * I suspect Debian would make more sense than Ubuntu 20.04 for your target audience. At least that's my personal strong preference.
- josteink 6y ago
  Ubuntu comes with working ZFS support OOB with no need to fiddle around. You don’t even need DKMS. My guess is implementing with Debian would be more effort.
  - ppf 6y ago
    It's quite easy. I got zfs working in minutes with Devuan.
  - 3np 6y ago
    It's just a matter of enabling the contrib repo
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Is it "currently in use Vs capacity"?
Thorentis 6y ago
So how is this better than rsync.net?
- FractalParadigm 6y ago
  The biggest difference that I can see is that this is more like a colo, where you own (or rent) your own equipment (in this case hard drives) to be stored in their facility, where you'll get a (rather generous IMO) VPS that can access your data.
- hestefisk 6y ago
  Probably faster, more efficient (less bandwidth consumed) sync because of block level replication rather than file-level.
  - sirn 6y ago
    rsync.net also offers block-level replication via zfs send[1] [1]: https://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html https://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html
    - hestefisk 6y ago
      Oh! Neat.
- croon 6y ago
  Seems to be a lot cheaper for one. Unless I'm missing something rsync.net is minimum $25/month for 1TB, and this is ~$15/month for 8TB.
- kencausey 6y ago
  Perhaps I'm wrong but this seems to give you full access to a VM whereas with rsync.net you only have very restricted access mostly to support storage and little else.
- dcchambers 6y ago
  They seem to offer different use cases - I'm not sure you can say one is better than the other. rsync.net is more expensive, but has included snapshots and better fault tolerance/data retention policies. It's also been around for nearly 20 years, they own their own datacenters, and have a proven track record with thousands of users. This is cheaper (maybe, depending on your bandwidth usage) and gives you better "ownership" of the hardware, but because it is hardware its just as likely to fail or corrupt data as a hard drive sitting under your desk. This service is also in beta with just a handful of users. Both companies seem to have really good policies and to be unix user-friendly.
teekert 6y ago
Invalid cert for me? (FireFox latest, win10)
- jeroenhd 6y ago
  Looks alright to me (certificate by Let's Encrypt for the right domain and a valid validity range).
- mldbk 6y ago
  Firefox 83, Fedora 32 works just fine.
wheybags 6y ago
> Due to current export restrictions, we cannot ship to international users :/ What restrictions are those? You even say people can use a forwarding service, if that were the case, wouldn't the forwarding service be illegal too?
- JosephRedfern 6y ago
  I'd guess that at this stage, it's probably not impossible, but may simply not be worth the paperwork and admin of ensuring compliance. Using a forwarding service shifts some of the liability.
- OJFord 6y ago
  I suppose the forwarding service might be different because it's you sending it to yourself; the US company only sent it to your US address. i.e. the restriction might be on US companies rather than 'exports from the US'. Just speculating.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  There are a lot of laws about sending cross border hardware and data. By saying US addresses only, they can say they had no knowledge of which country it was going to.
mavhc 6y ago
Do you have to end the key in the remote machine to send it encrypted backups? Can you merge in incremental sends without decrypting the backup on the remote machine?
- wumms 6y ago
  Current OpenZFS supports zfs send -w: "-w, -raw For encrypted datasets, send data exactly as it exists on disk. This allows backups to be taken even if encryption keys are not currently loaded. The backup may then be received on an untrusted machine since that machine will not have the encryption keys to read the protected data or alter it without being detected. Upon being received, the dataset will have the same encryption keys as it did on the send side, although the keylocation property will be defaulted to prompt if not otherwise provided. For unencrypted datasets, this flag will be equivalent to -Lec Note that if you do not use this flag for sending encrypted datasets, data will be sent unencrypted and may be re-encrypted with a different encryption key on the receiving system, which will disable the ability to do a raw send to that system for incrementals." Source: https://zfsonlinux.org/manpages/0.8.5/man8/zfs.8.html https://zfsonlinux.org/manpages/0.8.5/man8/zfs.8.html
  - mavhc 6y ago
    This would seem to make it the best backup system, you can merge your incremental backups over time, so never have to reset, without requiring any backup storage software on the remote computer, and it's never decrypted
    - jonmon6691 6y ago
      I totally agree. I actually just built some scripts to do this using rclone, but they could easily be modified to work with a remote ZFS which is actually way more ideal. It is encrypted in-flight, and at rest on the remote, and merging block-level increments never require decryption. My key never has to leave my local machine. https://github.com/jonmon6691/storage_architecture https://github.com/jonmon6691/storage_architecture
josteink 6y ago
Dumb question: if all you plan for the users to do is send ZFS snapshots (as a backup-service or whatever), isnt 12GBs of RAM per host quite excessive? Wouldn’t you be able to implement this cheaper using only 4-8GBs?
- stock_toaster 6y ago
  Only thing I could think of was maybe dedup. However, dedup chews up _lots_ of ram. Gobs of it. To be honest, 12gb doesn't seem like enough to run dedup on something like a 6TB pool (just an example) anyway. I recall reading rough estimates of 4x (or even 5x depending) ram for dedup sizing guidelines at one time.
  - vegardx 6y ago
    In this case wouldn't the deduplication be done on the sending system anyway?
gigatexal 6y ago
I like this and hope you all succeed. I'm not in a position to rent this just yet but i have bookmarked it for the future.
masa331 6y ago
I have no use for this service but i definitely like your text centered websites. Right to the point, no disturbing and useless images or graphics. Thanks, that was a breath of a fresh air. Also this https://radious.co/philosophy.txt https://radious.co/philosophy.txt I wish such design was usable outside tech community.
- surajs 6y ago
  A very backend developers philosophy of front end, not sure I agree though it sounds like generally good advice
- HatchedLake721 6y ago
  Why do you believe anyone outside tech community would value a text only 90's vibe websites?
  - mmahemoff 6y ago
    The ZFS site is more of a man page vibe to me, rather than retro/90s per se, as it's using some basic bold/underline and not just a pure ASCII doc. Maybe it's just designed for expedience, but I think it's a perfect fit for a service like this.
  - swiley 6y ago
    It implies they're trying to communicate with you rather than manipulate you.
    - HatchedLake721 6y ago
      -_- really? Industrial, UX and UI designers are manipulators now? Is Jony Ive the head manipulator? There are more ways to communicate than a black and white wall of text. One of them is called language of design. That's why designers use visual language to communicate with their users.
      - swiley 6y ago
rakoo 6y ago
I might be missing something, but the whole point of zpools is to guard against disks failure; this service only gives you one drive at a time, so you are back to square one. Is it not better to provide multiple smaller disks, so that the sum goes to 8TB ?
- bartvanH 6y ago
  Usually yes, but i wouldn't mind a single 8TB drive just as a backup location. All my data is already on a nice redundant system at home, but having just 1 extra replica somewhere else would be really good.
  - mldbk 6y ago
    As far as I understand, you can rent multiple 8TB drives
- detaro 6y ago
  It says on the page > Rent out multiple drives if you wish to create a RAIDZ or Mirror ZPool.
- est31 6y ago
  I guess the idea is that you rent multiple disks at once. Two disks of 8 TB each let you mirror the data redundantly for example.
  - rakoo 6y ago
    It seems to me if you want multiple drives you're gonna have multiple accounts. But this seems to be a beta phase so I guess it's more important to iron out the issues around creating a business that works, then you can have more drives in your account.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - erinnh 6y ago
daurnimator 6y ago
Sounds great; would you consider offering the same for `btrfs send`?
- kevincox 6y ago
  IIUC this is just a drive right?
joosters 6y ago
Despite the ZFS in the service name, there doesn't seem to be any actual ties/restrictions to ZFS, as far as I can see? It looks like you just rent a VM from them that has a dedicated hard drive attached to it. How you choose to format that drive would seem to be an implementation detail that can be left to the user. If so, it seems odd to limit your potential customers to people who use ZFS?
- geek_at 6y ago
  The marketing is key here. You guide potential customers to a solution for their problem which is perfectly normal even if the solution could be used in a different way too
0x0 6y ago
Exposing drives directly with no virtualization layer - is there a risk that a malicious user might somehow flash a trojan firmware onto the drive, and then later the drive is used for a different customer? The classic Sprite Hard Drive mod comes to mind https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=5 https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=5
- progval 6y ago
  Not an answer, but any dedicated server provider would have the same issue.
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  I think that’s why they have encryption and also you can own your own drive.
- vegardx 6y ago
  I'd imagine people that are paranoid about these things wouldn't be sending their unencrypted data to third parties anyway. So there's that. I'm a little skeptical to the claim that passthrough is so much faster than virtio-scsi or something similar. I'd imagine that the disk controllers and network would be the bottleneck. And as an added bonus you prevent people from doing shenanigans on disk firmware. We're talking about plate spinners here, latency isn't really what they're known for.
- mike_d 6y ago
  When you are no longer a customer, they mail the drive to you.
tleb_ 6y ago
Nice service. Seems a lot more trustful than a web giant. Would there be an equivalent for long term backup using a technology like tape storage? An alternative to S3 Glacier Deep Archive basically.
jl6 6y ago
1. This seems very, very cheap per-TB compared to other hosted storage. Are you making any compromises here that your users should know about? How do you explain the price difference between this and, for example, a Hetzner storage box or rsync.net? 2. Do you intend or allow these VMs to be used as web servers or any other kind of server?
- asd4 6y ago
  From the description it seems there is no backup or redundancy.
- radious_co 6y ago
  rsync.net is expensive because they are more of a "cold-storage be-all and end-all" data sink. Their backend is AWS, and so the cost reflects that. I might be wrong on this, but I think they use Glacier. Here, we are pretty much providing a datacenter hookup for your hard-drive. If that hard-drive fails, we can ship it to you for recovery, but that's on you. The idea for this site is that most people with ZFS pools already have a mirror/RAIDZ setup at home, and would enjoy the peace of mind if they had one-extra data-sink to send their snapshots. Therefore, true data-loss will occur if: * Their house burns down * AND the remote zfs.rent hard drive fails ...all at the same time. --- Personally, I live about 20 minutes aways from my parents' house. I have two separate ZPools (one for my place, one for theirs). I sync the two every time I visit. I wanted an extra cloud machine to sync to once a week or so -- you know, in case Northern California fires really get out-of-hand :/ --- EDIT: I went to rsync.net just to double-check. It looks like they are running their own infrastructure now. https://www.rsync.net/products/locations.html https://www.rsync.net/products/locations.html Maybe my memory is going haywire, but I swear I remembered reading that they used AWS as their backend.
  - baaym 6y ago
    Perhaps you're confusing rsync.net with tarsnap? When I compared services for my personal off-site backup I came across Tarsnap and their AWS-based infra as well. I ended up using rsync.net with borgbackup.
zmix 6y ago
This is very cool. Too bad I don't have a need for it, currently.
arpinum 6y ago
Is this service currently running in the closest of your house? It shares the same certificate as your personal website.
- ryanmjacobs 6y ago
  Hahaha no I have several sites running with that Let's Encrypt cert. I'm working on separating them out, but until I get my DNS Let's Encrypt process automated, I'm just extending the cert via certbot.sh :/
toast0 6y ago
> For rent-to-own drives, we purchase an 8-TB drive from Amazon Last I heard, Amazon still can't ship a hard drive properly; I would recommend a source that won't put the hard drive box in a much larger box with a garnish of air pillows, so the drive can rattle around and likely end up damaged.
- mike_d 6y ago
  You're going to be shocked when you discover how little packaging or care goes in to distributing hard drives from the manufacturer to the retailer.
tutfbhuf 6y ago
Why don't you span a ceph cluster across your servers and combine all these 8 TB drives into one big pool. Then you could sell it as cloud storage with freely configurable storage sizes.
- vipa123 6y ago
  Find a niche market, and make it your own
- Tepix 6y ago
  To each his own.
- jedimastert 6y ago
  That's overhead
antihero 6y ago
Looks awesome! Have sent an email :)
Tepix 6y ago
What's a cheap option for a ZFS based NAS systme at home? QNAP is now offering ZFS based systems but they are rather pricey. Is it just BYO? How can i make one that is super power efficient?
- Certified 6y ago
  I highly recommend the BYO route, especially if you have part of a suitable machine already lying around. Just about any x86 based system that can take 16GB+ of memory will be a good candidate. ECC is recommended but many people, myself included, have run many stable years without ECC. Load the latest Ubuntu up and give this [1] ars how-to article a read (keeping in mind it is several years old now). Power efficiency will mostly hinge on the cpu and how many hard drives you keep spinning. To scale past the the number of SATA ports you have on a motherboard, add an LSI HBA card like the 9300-8E or 9207-8E. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/ars-walkthrough-using-the-zfs-next-gen-filesystem-on-linux/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/ars-w...
  - Osiris 6y ago
    I bought a mini-ITX board with 4 SATA ports and an embedded CPU. I added a PCIe card with 2 additional SATA ports. I bought a mini-ITX case with mounts for 6 HDDs. I have 5 8TB drives (RAIDZ2) and 1 SSD as the boot drive. The system runs Ubuntu Server. I found this setup a lot cheaper than the dedicated NAS boxes you can buy and more flexible.
    - vermaden 6y ago
      Can you post a link to that Mini-ITX case? Thanks.
      - jtbarrett 6y ago
        I’m not the parent but I built something similar in the Fractal Node 304 which supports six 2.5” drives. Mine’s been going strong for 7 years now. https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/node/node-304 https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/node/node-304
implying 6y ago
I've been looking for an off-site cloud storage provider that takes encrypted zfs sends, so I believe I'm in the target market for this. My use case is a home storage server with a zpool of several hundred terabytes. However, there are some product compromises that would preclude me from using this. First, I already manage drive purchases, parity, dealing with scrubs and errors, etc. for my pool. I don't want to duplicate my effort for a second backup pool. ZFS sends are, ultimately just a long binary, and I simply want them stored, without much hassle. If I'm planning a zpool expansion, the work in using this service is now doubled, having to (non-trivially) determine the best pool geometry for my own pool, and for a backup pool made up of differently sized drives. I also don't understand why someone would want to give you their encryption passphrase. A service like this should just take encrypted sends, and send them back when requested. I don't want my plaintext anywhere other than my own hardware. That said, your main competitor suffers from all of these problems as well.
- dsp_person 6y ago
  > I also don't understand why someone would want to give you their encryption passphrase. A service like this should just take encrypted sends, and send them back when requested. I don't want my plaintext anywhere other than my own hardware. it can, see raw sends: e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148494
- seized 6y ago
  ZFS encrypted datasets allow for raw sends, the target server never needs the decryption key. To securely restore you would need to be able to ZFS send back to yourself first.
Poiesis 6y ago
Neat idea. A couple of questions: Does the nominal bandwidth cost of $5 for 1 TB mean it's $5 each month for a TB per month? Or is it simply "every 1TB transferred adds $5", no matter how long it took to use that much? For the rent to own plan, the only thing you're paying after payoff is the bandwidth fee? (Which for minimal usage might be under $5 or $5 depending on the above answer) Is that right?
- radious_co 6y ago
  Yeah, I guess the word "nominal" is a little awkward in this case. We meant it in the sense that most users... will not exceed 1 TB/month data movement, therefore the _nominal_ or _expected_ charge would be $5. Take myself for example, once my data was in the system, I maybe move 30 GB a month and that's it. (Although we're dealing with ZFS datahoarders here... so some assumptions may need to be discarded ...) --- > For the rent to own plan, the only thing you're paying after payoff is the bandwidth fee? (Which for minimal usage might be under $5 or $5 depending on the above answer) Is that right? Yup. That's correct. You're just paying for a slot in the machine + bandwidth. If you need extra bandwidth, it's $5/TB.
O_H_E 6y ago
@ryanmjacobs I think the ram page misspells "DDR4" to "DD4"
sabujp 6y ago
what are uses of this? if I want to back up linux I can now via https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664628-How-does-Backblaze-support-Linux-Users- https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664628-How-d... . This option seems more expensive per month. In the future I could even see backblaze offering something similar to this since they are a zfs shop anyways
- Defenestresque 6y ago
  I entered 8TB initial load/1TB monthly transfer into BackBlaze's "calculator" for "cloud storage" (is this the same as their personal service? It's the only pricing info I could find even after three min of looking..) and it quoted me $735/year. Maybe I'm missing something.
  - sabujp 6y ago
    yea i'm just talking about personal storage and not business or random cloud storage that any client can hit
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
The bandwidth is what kills this for me. I actually have a use-case for something like this. I'm re-partitioning my ZFS array, adding some space, and need to host all of the data for a few months while I get it all setup and tested, but the bandwidth cost at $5/TB is prohibitive. What's the best place to do this? I'm using google drive, but they throttle your upload quite significantly. I can see right now I'm getting about ~150kB/sec even though I have a 1GB upload speed.
- vitiral 6y ago
  I left a comment recommending that they allow people to send _them_ 8TB drives (which the customer then already owns), which would invalidate the initial upload cost :D
vitiral 6y ago
Recommendation: since the "rent to own model" is so built in already, also permit people to ship you THEIR drive (which they still get to own). This allows them to have a backup of existing data without the cost of upload.
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  Yep. Great advice.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  And in between those two, I'd be interested in the rent-to-own minus the rent: just let me pay for the drive up-front.
waynesonfire 6y ago
excellent UI.
rubatuga 6y ago
You lose a key feature of ZFS, which is scrubbing. This feature requires multiple drives in a zpool, while you only provides one. Scrubbing generally happens once a month to prevent double or triple bit flips in the same location, however you might get bit rot with your service.
- kinghajj 6y ago
  > Rent out multiple drives if you wish to create a RAIDZ or Mirror ZPool.
- seized 6y ago
  You can scrub but not repair, ZFS will tell you of corruption but not be able to repair. You can also set copies blocks/data (copies=2) which stores two copies on one drive, allowing you to repair. Doesn't cover you for drive failures but can for bitflips. And you'd get half the storage.
acd 6y ago
You probably could use something like hdparm to power off unused drives and save power/watts/data center bill when they are not being used to send receive ZFS snapshots. hd-idle and hdparm -Y alt hdparm -S 600 /dev/sdx
ApolloFortyNine 6y ago
$5/TB with only a guarantee of 100mbps is kind of unacceptable no? I definitely think you would have benefited from finding a cheaper datacenter, or moving your profit margins elsewhere. Honestly seems really interesting sans that tidbit, would be interesting to have unlimited 100mbps but gigabit at $5/TB or something like that. But $40 just to fill the drive is a bit much, and with being hard disk with only 4GB of RAM I'd think backups are what this is targeting, and not something with a lot of activity. Looks like a hobby project so it's no big deal, just giving my opinion.
dcchambers 6y ago
This is pretty neat. I am sure the comparisons to rsync.net will be made, but I see both services as unique and as covering different use cases. Good luck with the beta!
parliament32 6y ago
>There is a limit to how many drives we can fit in a 4U rackmount server. Anecdote: Let me introduce you to the SuperMicro 6047R-E1R36L, a 4U chassis with 36 (!) 3.5" drive bays. How, you ask? By having bays in the front and back, of course. From experience, I can tell you this baby weighs a metric fuck-ton when loaded with drives and is an absolute abomination, but it's a wonder to behold. https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/6047/SSG-6047R-E1R36L.cfm https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/6047/SSG-6047R...
- tpolzer 6y ago
  The Supermicro DE1CR60 fits 60 3.5" drives in 4U with top loading.
  - rckoepke 6y ago
    In googling this I found the Supermicro DE1CR90 which apparently fits 90 3.5" drives in 4U. I suppose this would be close to 300lbs fully loaded.
    - sliken 6y ago
      That thing is quite deep, don't assume it will fit in a normal rack, and even if you manage it you may find that the ports on a zero-U PDU are blocked.
- abrookewood 6y ago
  I laugh at your 36 drives and present to you the Backblaze Pod: 60 drives! Look upon it and weep! https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-server/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-serv...
loxias 6y ago
Fantastic service! I also have thought of offering this as a side project, but I'm glad to see someone else get to it first so I don't have to. Also loving the website layout. No muss no fuss. One question I don't see answered: If I go the rent-to-own route, then what's the monthly price (for use of the VM and to pay the colo fees) after I've purchased the drive? $5? And is there a price cut if I want to purchase the drive outright in one payment instead of split monthly?
unixhero 6y ago
This sounds line a viable option for me. I really like the service.

403 points by ryanmjacobs 6y ago

I wish I had the upstream to consider a similar service.

This seems to expose a common misconception among ZFS people (and one I previously erroneously harbored) that an SLOG device is useful on a remote machine (that you are not connected to via nfs). It is not. It is useful for synchronous writes only, such as those done by a local database server, or remotely via NFS. If you’re just sshing in to send data, an SLOG device is a waste.

mkj 6y ago
You mean "sshing in to 'zfs send' data" won't need a SLOG? That's a good point. This zfs.rent server lets you run local programs too on it, so SLOG would help there.
- seized 6y ago
  But again, only if whatever you are running does sync writes to storage. Many things will never benefit from or even use a SLOG. A SLOG on a pool doing async writes doesn't get used. So maybe some databases or some specific apps, but whatever you'd run in a 4GM RAM KVM won't be much.

londons_explore 6y ago

Will you actually make money from this? It seems like you might have added up your costs, but not left any room to pay for your hours, unused capacity, unpaid bills, overheads, profit, etc.

dewey 6y ago
I guess this is done through the traffic costs? 1TB included, each additional $5/TB which is probably higher than the "real" cost of the traffic.
- diggan 6y ago
  > probably higher than the "real" cost of the traffic Hopefully the project is setup in a way so it avoids the scam AWS et al does with charging for "premium" bandwidth, meaning the cost of the bandwidth should either be a static sum each month, way cheaper or free.
  - dewey 6y ago
    "Free" or "Unlimited" bandwidth always feels worse to me than charging the appropriate amount as you know there's a limit somewhere. No such thing as unlimited bandwidth.
    - diggan 6y ago
      I agree with charging the "appropriate amount", but that's not what AWS and the other hosting providers are offering though. They are offering you a price that is vastly different than what it actually costs. Instead hosts like Hetzner and OVH uses a price closer to the true cost for bandwidth for their users. Take a look at their dedicated hosting and the pricing. I'm not sponsored by either, but I am a happy user of Hetzner. Check out this talk by Kyle Drake that goes more into the details of bandwidth costs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i6wvix6buI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i6wvix6buI
      - dewey 6y ago
        Agreed on the bandwidth costs from GCP/AWS. I’m a happy customer of OVH for a decade already and their pricing seems closer to reality.
    - progval 6y ago
      I've been renting servers at Scaleway Dedibox (formerly Online.net) for years, with free unlimited bandwidth. I can be pretty bandwidth-intensive for a few weeks at a time (eg. rebalancing a storage cluster) and never had any trouble.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
GauntletWizard 6y ago
That’s my concern. I would 100% sign up at this price, but I’m doing the math in my head: They offer 4GB VMs; Assuming they’re oversold and using a good backblaze-pod like design, they can fit ~32 drives per U. 32 * $5/mo is $160; Assuming they’re paying $50/U and the customer’s guaranteed bandwidth is included in their colo cost, that gives them $110 gross margin. Cost of drives is retail - If they have a better supplier that’s a few $ more, but not a lot. The hardware to run that is another real cost. I doubt it costs less than $2000/U to outfit the hardware; It doesn’t have to be beefy but SATA slots add up. That gives a payoff time of ~18 months. Doable, but not amazing. At a scale of a few dozen racks, this could be a lifestyle business, but it’s sorta marginally so. Assuming a hardware lifetime of 3 years, you start breaking even halfway in. Lifetime margin is about the cost of the hardware - $2000/u. If this is a single man show, about 2 racks (= ~3000 customers) gives a reasonable “salary”, but the upfront costs are high.

codetrotter 6y ago

This is pretty attractive to me. One thing I am wondering is, do you offer some sort of simple status panel where I can see the amount of data transfer that I have used for the month? Also, another thing. I might want to use this service for storing copies of important data that I download from the net. But rather than first downloading it to my own computer and then sending it to your servers, does the account on your servers have a shell so that I can run for example wget directly on the server and is it able to connect to arbitrary remote IP or only to whitelisted IP addresses? Also, your page lists IPv4 but not IPv6. Any word on IPv6?

jsjohnst 6y ago
> Also, your page lists IPv4 but not IPv6. Any word on IPv6? You could use TunnelBroker.net on top to get IPv6 if they don’t offer it and your use case requires it.
radious_co 6y ago
Hi! We are currently working on a _simple_ account management portal backed by our PostgreSQL instance. This will print out a monthly table with your bandwidth usage/quota and provide a Web Interface + API to purchase more bandwidth, add drives, etc. Our design is API first, with a simple wrapper around the API as our Web UI. They both will be well-documented and functionally the same. This Hacker News soft launch was mainly to see if we could generate enough users to purchase a second and third server and scale-out. And by the looks of it, we can! --- As for downloading large files directly to the instance, I'm with you 100%. That's exactly one one of the use cases. (I'm looking at you: massive linux ISOs and +30 GB Xilinx toolchains.) Personally, I like to download them first to a remote machine (takes about 5-10 minutes for 30 GB) and slowly rsync them to my local dev machine with `rsync --partial --bwlimit=10M`. Think of this service as $5/month DigitalOcean VPS, but it happens to have a hefty native storage unit passed through. You can SSH into it and do whatever you want with it. In fact, you don't even have to run ZFS. You could run any filesystem -- EXT4, XFS, BTRFS, etc. Compute-wise, it's not going to be anything groundbreaking -- just a 16-core Ryzen 3700 with a couple of cores passed through to you. Ryzen CPUs support ECC and are still priced as consumer-CPUs which is fantastic. The nice thing about KVM is that even if you don't explicity allocate CPU resources, if the guest machine needs to burst compute, it will "Steal time" from the hypervisor as long as there is extra headroom. This isn't the case with RAM. (For RAM, whatever you set, that is the hard maximum limit.)

3np 6y ago

Love the idea, will consider it and hope it works out for you. Two things: * What does the 20 mbps / 1gbps capacity indicate? How is this former number derived? * I suspect Debian would make more sense than Ubuntu 20.04 for your target audience. At least that's my personal strong preference.

josteink 6y ago
Ubuntu comes with working ZFS support OOB with no need to fiddle around. You don’t even need DKMS. My guess is implementing with Debian would be more effort.
- ppf 6y ago
  It's quite easy. I got zfs working in minutes with Devuan.
- 3np 6y ago
  It's just a matter of enabling the contrib repo
londons_explore 6y ago
Is it "currently in use Vs capacity"?

Thorentis 6y ago

So how is this better than rsync.net?

FractalParadigm 6y ago
The biggest difference that I can see is that this is more like a colo, where you own (or rent) your own equipment (in this case hard drives) to be stored in their facility, where you'll get a (rather generous IMO) VPS that can access your data.
hestefisk 6y ago
Probably faster, more efficient (less bandwidth consumed) sync because of block level replication rather than file-level.
- sirn 6y ago
  rsync.net also offers block-level replication via zfs send[1] [1]: https://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html https://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html
  - hestefisk 6y ago
    Oh! Neat.
croon 6y ago
Seems to be a lot cheaper for one. Unless I'm missing something rsync.net is minimum $25/month for 1TB, and this is ~$15/month for 8TB.
kencausey 6y ago
Perhaps I'm wrong but this seems to give you full access to a VM whereas with rsync.net you only have very restricted access mostly to support storage and little else.
dcchambers 6y ago
They seem to offer different use cases - I'm not sure you can say one is better than the other. rsync.net is more expensive, but has included snapshots and better fault tolerance/data retention policies. It's also been around for nearly 20 years, they own their own datacenters, and have a proven track record with thousands of users. This is cheaper (maybe, depending on your bandwidth usage) and gives you better "ownership" of the hardware, but because it is hardware its just as likely to fail or corrupt data as a hard drive sitting under your desk. This service is also in beta with just a handful of users. Both companies seem to have really good policies and to be unix user-friendly.

teekert 6y ago

Invalid cert for me? (FireFox latest, win10)

jeroenhd 6y ago
Looks alright to me (certificate by Let's Encrypt for the right domain and a valid validity range).
mldbk 6y ago
Firefox 83, Fedora 32 works just fine.

wheybags 6y ago

> Due to current export restrictions, we cannot ship to international users :/ What restrictions are those? You even say people can use a forwarding service, if that were the case, wouldn't the forwarding service be illegal too?

JosephRedfern 6y ago
I'd guess that at this stage, it's probably not impossible, but may simply not be worth the paperwork and admin of ensuring compliance. Using a forwarding service shifts some of the liability.
OJFord 6y ago
I suppose the forwarding service might be different because it's you sending it to yourself; the US company only sent it to your US address. i.e. the restriction might be on US companies rather than 'exports from the US'. Just speculating.
londons_explore 6y ago
There are a lot of laws about sending cross border hardware and data. By saying US addresses only, they can say they had no knowledge of which country it was going to.

mavhc 6y ago

Do you have to end the key in the remote machine to send it encrypted backups? Can you merge in incremental sends without decrypting the backup on the remote machine?

wumms 6y ago
Current OpenZFS supports zfs send -w: "-w, -raw For encrypted datasets, send data exactly as it exists on disk. This allows backups to be taken even if encryption keys are not currently loaded. The backup may then be received on an untrusted machine since that machine will not have the encryption keys to read the protected data or alter it without being detected. Upon being received, the dataset will have the same encryption keys as it did on the send side, although the keylocation property will be defaulted to prompt if not otherwise provided. For unencrypted datasets, this flag will be equivalent to -Lec Note that if you do not use this flag for sending encrypted datasets, data will be sent unencrypted and may be re-encrypted with a different encryption key on the receiving system, which will disable the ability to do a raw send to that system for incrementals." Source: https://zfsonlinux.org/manpages/0.8.5/man8/zfs.8.html https://zfsonlinux.org/manpages/0.8.5/man8/zfs.8.html
- mavhc 6y ago
  This would seem to make it the best backup system, you can merge your incremental backups over time, so never have to reset, without requiring any backup storage software on the remote computer, and it's never decrypted
  - jonmon6691 6y ago
    I totally agree. I actually just built some scripts to do this using rclone, but they could easily be modified to work with a remote ZFS which is actually way more ideal. It is encrypted in-flight, and at rest on the remote, and merging block-level increments never require decryption. My key never has to leave my local machine. https://github.com/jonmon6691/storage_architecture https://github.com/jonmon6691/storage_architecture

josteink 6y ago

Dumb question: if all you plan for the users to do is send ZFS snapshots (as a backup-service or whatever), isnt 12GBs of RAM per host quite excessive? Wouldn’t you be able to implement this cheaper using only 4-8GBs?

stock_toaster 6y ago
Only thing I could think of was maybe dedup. However, dedup chews up _lots_ of ram. Gobs of it. To be honest, 12gb doesn't seem like enough to run dedup on something like a 6TB pool (just an example) anyway. I recall reading rough estimates of 4x (or even 5x depending) ram for dedup sizing guidelines at one time.
- vegardx 6y ago
  In this case wouldn't the deduplication be done on the sending system anyway?

gigatexal 6y ago

I like this and hope you all succeed. I'm not in a position to rent this just yet but i have bookmarked it for the future.

masa331 6y ago

I have no use for this service but i definitely like your text centered websites. Right to the point, no disturbing and useless images or graphics. Thanks, that was a breath of a fresh air. Also this https://radious.co/philosophy.txt https://radious.co/philosophy.txt I wish such design was usable outside tech community.

surajs 6y ago
A very backend developers philosophy of front end, not sure I agree though it sounds like generally good advice
HatchedLake721 6y ago
Why do you believe anyone outside tech community would value a text only 90's vibe websites?
- mmahemoff 6y ago
  The ZFS site is more of a man page vibe to me, rather than retro/90s per se, as it's using some basic bold/underline and not just a pure ASCII doc. Maybe it's just designed for expedience, but I think it's a perfect fit for a service like this.
- swiley 6y ago
  It implies they're trying to communicate with you rather than manipulate you.
  - HatchedLake721 6y ago
    -_- really? Industrial, UX and UI designers are manipulators now? Is Jony Ive the head manipulator? There are more ways to communicate than a black and white wall of text. One of them is called language of design. That's why designers use visual language to communicate with their users.
    - swiley 6y ago

rakoo 6y ago

I might be missing something, but the whole point of zpools is to guard against disks failure; this service only gives you one drive at a time, so you are back to square one. Is it not better to provide multiple smaller disks, so that the sum goes to 8TB ?

bartvanH 6y ago
Usually yes, but i wouldn't mind a single 8TB drive just as a backup location. All my data is already on a nice redundant system at home, but having just 1 extra replica somewhere else would be really good.
- mldbk 6y ago
  As far as I understand, you can rent multiple 8TB drives
detaro 6y ago
It says on the page > Rent out multiple drives if you wish to create a RAIDZ or Mirror ZPool.
est31 6y ago
I guess the idea is that you rent multiple disks at once. Two disks of 8 TB each let you mirror the data redundantly for example.
- rakoo 6y ago
  It seems to me if you want multiple drives you're gonna have multiple accounts. But this seems to be a beta phase so I guess it's more important to iron out the issues around creating a business that works, then you can have more drives in your account.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - erinnh 6y ago

daurnimator 6y ago

Sounds great; would you consider offering the same for `btrfs send`?

kevincox 6y ago
IIUC this is just a drive right?

joosters 6y ago

Despite the ZFS in the service name, there doesn't seem to be any actual ties/restrictions to ZFS, as far as I can see? It looks like you just rent a VM from them that has a dedicated hard drive attached to it. How you choose to format that drive would seem to be an implementation detail that can be left to the user. If so, it seems odd to limit your potential customers to people who use ZFS?

geek_at 6y ago
The marketing is key here. You guide potential customers to a solution for their problem which is perfectly normal even if the solution could be used in a different way too

0x0 6y ago

Exposing drives directly with no virtualization layer - is there a risk that a malicious user might somehow flash a trojan firmware onto the drive, and then later the drive is used for a different customer? The classic Sprite Hard Drive mod comes to mind https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=5 https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=5

progval 6y ago
Not an answer, but any dedicated server provider would have the same issue.
IgorPartola 6y ago
I think that’s why they have encryption and also you can own your own drive.
vegardx 6y ago
I'd imagine people that are paranoid about these things wouldn't be sending their unencrypted data to third parties anyway. So there's that. I'm a little skeptical to the claim that passthrough is so much faster than virtio-scsi or something similar. I'd imagine that the disk controllers and network would be the bottleneck. And as an added bonus you prevent people from doing shenanigans on disk firmware. We're talking about plate spinners here, latency isn't really what they're known for.
mike_d 6y ago
When you are no longer a customer, they mail the drive to you.

tleb_ 6y ago

Nice service. Seems a lot more trustful than a web giant. Would there be an equivalent for long term backup using a technology like tape storage? An alternative to S3 Glacier Deep Archive basically.

jl6 6y ago

1. This seems very, very cheap per-TB compared to other hosted storage. Are you making any compromises here that your users should know about? How do you explain the price difference between this and, for example, a Hetzner storage box or rsync.net? 2. Do you intend or allow these VMs to be used as web servers or any other kind of server?

asd4 6y ago
From the description it seems there is no backup or redundancy.
radious_co 6y ago
rsync.net is expensive because they are more of a "cold-storage be-all and end-all" data sink. Their backend is AWS, and so the cost reflects that. I might be wrong on this, but I think they use Glacier. Here, we are pretty much providing a datacenter hookup for your hard-drive. If that hard-drive fails, we can ship it to you for recovery, but that's on you. The idea for this site is that most people with ZFS pools already have a mirror/RAIDZ setup at home, and would enjoy the peace of mind if they had one-extra data-sink to send their snapshots. Therefore, true data-loss will occur if: * Their house burns down * AND the remote zfs.rent hard drive fails ...all at the same time. --- Personally, I live about 20 minutes aways from my parents' house. I have two separate ZPools (one for my place, one for theirs). I sync the two every time I visit. I wanted an extra cloud machine to sync to once a week or so -- you know, in case Northern California fires really get out-of-hand :/ --- EDIT: I went to rsync.net just to double-check. It looks like they are running their own infrastructure now. https://www.rsync.net/products/locations.html https://www.rsync.net/products/locations.html Maybe my memory is going haywire, but I swear I remembered reading that they used AWS as their backend.
- baaym 6y ago
  Perhaps you're confusing rsync.net with tarsnap? When I compared services for my personal off-site backup I came across Tarsnap and their AWS-based infra as well. I ended up using rsync.net with borgbackup.

zmix 6y ago

This is very cool. Too bad I don't have a need for it, currently.

arpinum 6y ago

Is this service currently running in the closest of your house? It shares the same certificate as your personal website.

ryanmjacobs 6y ago
Hahaha no I have several sites running with that Let's Encrypt cert. I'm working on separating them out, but until I get my DNS Let's Encrypt process automated, I'm just extending the cert via certbot.sh :/

toast0 6y ago

> For rent-to-own drives, we purchase an 8-TB drive from Amazon Last I heard, Amazon still can't ship a hard drive properly; I would recommend a source that won't put the hard drive box in a much larger box with a garnish of air pillows, so the drive can rattle around and likely end up damaged.

mike_d 6y ago
You're going to be shocked when you discover how little packaging or care goes in to distributing hard drives from the manufacturer to the retailer.

tutfbhuf 6y ago

Why don't you span a ceph cluster across your servers and combine all these 8 TB drives into one big pool. Then you could sell it as cloud storage with freely configurable storage sizes.

vipa123 6y ago
Find a niche market, and make it your own
Tepix 6y ago
To each his own.
jedimastert 6y ago
That's overhead

antihero 6y ago

Looks awesome! Have sent an email :)

Tepix 6y ago

What's a cheap option for a ZFS based NAS systme at home? QNAP is now offering ZFS based systems but they are rather pricey. Is it just BYO? How can i make one that is super power efficient?

Certified 6y ago
I highly recommend the BYO route, especially if you have part of a suitable machine already lying around. Just about any x86 based system that can take 16GB+ of memory will be a good candidate. ECC is recommended but many people, myself included, have run many stable years without ECC. Load the latest Ubuntu up and give this [1] ars how-to article a read (keeping in mind it is several years old now). Power efficiency will mostly hinge on the cpu and how many hard drives you keep spinning. To scale past the the number of SATA ports you have on a motherboard, add an LSI HBA card like the 9300-8E or 9207-8E. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/ars-walkthrough-using-the-zfs-next-gen-filesystem-on-linux/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/ars-w...
- Osiris 6y ago
  I bought a mini-ITX board with 4 SATA ports and an embedded CPU. I added a PCIe card with 2 additional SATA ports. I bought a mini-ITX case with mounts for 6 HDDs. I have 5 8TB drives (RAIDZ2) and 1 SSD as the boot drive. The system runs Ubuntu Server. I found this setup a lot cheaper than the dedicated NAS boxes you can buy and more flexible.
  - vermaden 6y ago
    Can you post a link to that Mini-ITX case? Thanks.
    - jtbarrett 6y ago
      I’m not the parent but I built something similar in the Fractal Node 304 which supports six 2.5” drives. Mine’s been going strong for 7 years now. https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/node/node-304 https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/node/node-304

implying 6y ago

I've been looking for an off-site cloud storage provider that takes encrypted zfs sends, so I believe I'm in the target market for this. My use case is a home storage server with a zpool of several hundred terabytes. However, there are some product compromises that would preclude me from using this. First, I already manage drive purchases, parity, dealing with scrubs and errors, etc. for my pool. I don't want to duplicate my effort for a second backup pool. ZFS sends are, ultimately just a long binary, and I simply want them stored, without much hassle. If I'm planning a zpool expansion, the work in using this service is now doubled, having to (non-trivially) determine the best pool geometry for my own pool, and for a backup pool made up of differently sized drives. I also don't understand why someone would want to give you their encryption passphrase. A service like this should just take encrypted sends, and send them back when requested. I don't want my plaintext anywhere other than my own hardware. That said, your main competitor suffers from all of these problems as well.

dsp_person 6y ago
> I also don't understand why someone would want to give you their encryption passphrase. A service like this should just take encrypted sends, and send them back when requested. I don't want my plaintext anywhere other than my own hardware. it can, see raw sends: e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148494
seized 6y ago
ZFS encrypted datasets allow for raw sends, the target server never needs the decryption key. To securely restore you would need to be able to ZFS send back to yourself first.

Poiesis 6y ago

Neat idea. A couple of questions: Does the nominal bandwidth cost of $5 for 1 TB mean it's $5 each month for a TB per month? Or is it simply "every 1TB transferred adds $5", no matter how long it took to use that much? For the rent to own plan, the only thing you're paying after payoff is the bandwidth fee? (Which for minimal usage might be under $5 or $5 depending on the above answer) Is that right?

radious_co 6y ago
Yeah, I guess the word "nominal" is a little awkward in this case. We meant it in the sense that most users... will not exceed 1 TB/month data movement, therefore the _nominal_ or _expected_ charge would be $5. Take myself for example, once my data was in the system, I maybe move 30 GB a month and that's it. (Although we're dealing with ZFS datahoarders here... so some assumptions may need to be discarded ...) --- > For the rent to own plan, the only thing you're paying after payoff is the bandwidth fee? (Which for minimal usage might be under $5 or $5 depending on the above answer) Is that right? Yup. That's correct. You're just paying for a slot in the machine + bandwidth. If you need extra bandwidth, it's $5/TB.

O_H_E 6y ago

@ryanmjacobs I think the ram page misspells "DDR4" to "DD4"

sabujp 6y ago

what are uses of this? if I want to back up linux I can now via https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664628-How-does-Backblaze-support-Linux-Users- https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664628-How-d... . This option seems more expensive per month. In the future I could even see backblaze offering something similar to this since they are a zfs shop anyways

Defenestresque 6y ago
I entered 8TB initial load/1TB monthly transfer into BackBlaze's "calculator" for "cloud storage" (is this the same as their personal service? It's the only pricing info I could find even after three min of looking..) and it quoted me $735/year. Maybe I'm missing something.
- sabujp 6y ago
  yea i'm just talking about personal storage and not business or random cloud storage that any client can hit

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

The bandwidth is what kills this for me. I actually have a use-case for something like this. I'm re-partitioning my ZFS array, adding some space, and need to host all of the data for a few months while I get it all setup and tested, but the bandwidth cost at $5/TB is prohibitive. What's the best place to do this? I'm using google drive, but they throttle your upload quite significantly. I can see right now I'm getting about ~150kB/sec even though I have a 1GB upload speed.

vitiral 6y ago
I left a comment recommending that they allow people to send _them_ 8TB drives (which the customer then already owns), which would invalidate the initial upload cost :D

vitiral 6y ago

Recommendation: since the "rent to own model" is so built in already, also permit people to ship you THEIR drive (which they still get to own). This allows them to have a backup of existing data without the cost of upload.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Yep. Great advice.
yellowapple 6y ago
And in between those two, I'd be interested in the rent-to-own minus the rent: just let me pay for the drive up-front.

waynesonfire 6y ago

excellent UI.

rubatuga 6y ago

You lose a key feature of ZFS, which is scrubbing. This feature requires multiple drives in a zpool, while you only provides one. Scrubbing generally happens once a month to prevent double or triple bit flips in the same location, however you might get bit rot with your service.

kinghajj 6y ago
> Rent out multiple drives if you wish to create a RAIDZ or Mirror ZPool.
seized 6y ago
You can scrub but not repair, ZFS will tell you of corruption but not be able to repair. You can also set copies blocks/data (copies=2) which stores two copies on one drive, allowing you to repair. Doesn't cover you for drive failures but can for bitflips. And you'd get half the storage.

acd 6y ago

You probably could use something like hdparm to power off unused drives and save power/watts/data center bill when they are not being used to send receive ZFS snapshots. hd-idle and hdparm -Y alt hdparm -S 600 /dev/sdx

ApolloFortyNine 6y ago

$5/TB with only a guarantee of 100mbps is kind of unacceptable no? I definitely think you would have benefited from finding a cheaper datacenter, or moving your profit margins elsewhere. Honestly seems really interesting sans that tidbit, would be interesting to have unlimited 100mbps but gigabit at $5/TB or something like that. But $40 just to fill the drive is a bit much, and with being hard disk with only 4GB of RAM I'd think backups are what this is targeting, and not something with a lot of activity. Looks like a hobby project so it's no big deal, just giving my opinion.

dcchambers 6y ago

This is pretty neat. I am sure the comparisons to rsync.net will be made, but I see both services as unique and as covering different use cases. Good luck with the beta!

parliament32 6y ago

>There is a limit to how many drives we can fit in a 4U rackmount server. Anecdote: Let me introduce you to the SuperMicro 6047R-E1R36L, a 4U chassis with 36 (!) 3.5" drive bays. How, you ask? By having bays in the front and back, of course. From experience, I can tell you this baby weighs a metric fuck-ton when loaded with drives and is an absolute abomination, but it's a wonder to behold. https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/6047/SSG-6047R-E1R36L.cfm https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/6047/SSG-6047R...

tpolzer 6y ago
The Supermicro DE1CR60 fits 60 3.5" drives in 4U with top loading.
- rckoepke 6y ago
  In googling this I found the Supermicro DE1CR90 which apparently fits 90 3.5" drives in 4U. I suppose this would be close to 300lbs fully loaded.
  - sliken 6y ago
    That thing is quite deep, don't assume it will fit in a normal rack, and even if you manage it you may find that the ports on a zero-U PDU are blocked.
abrookewood 6y ago
I laugh at your 36 drives and present to you the Backblaze Pod: 60 drives! Look upon it and weep! https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-server/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-serv...

loxias 6y ago

Fantastic service! I also have thought of offering this as a side project, but I'm glad to see someone else get to it first so I don't have to. Also loving the website layout. No muss no fuss. One question I don't see answered: If I go the rent-to-own route, then what's the monthly price (for use of the VM and to pay the colo fees) after I've purchased the drive? $5? And is there a price cut if I want to purchase the drive outright in one payment instead of split monthly?

unixhero 6y ago

This sounds line a viable option for me. I really like the service.