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The real lesson here is that if your service relies on "Big Data" processing it pays off to build your own storage. If you were to buy 135Tb on Amazon EC2/EBS

by dmk23 15y ago

The real lesson here is that if your service relies on "Big Data" processing it pays off to build your own storage. If you were to buy 135Tb on Amazon EC2/EBS the same capacity would cost you ~$19,000 per month, not counting charges for I/O and bandwidth.

beagle3 15y ago
Well, space, air conditioning electricity and redundancy comparable to what Amazon offers would add a few thousands per month (I guess $2000-$5000, depending on where you are). Still, way cheaper than Amazon, but there are nontrivial running costs beyond the purchase and build price.
- moe 15y ago
  You should be able to rent half a rack with sufficient power to house this for around $1000/mo in just about any civilized datacenter.
  - lsc 15y ago
    I'd love to sell you a half rack and a 20a circuit for a grand a month. That's high even here in the sf bay area.
DanBC 15y ago
No. If you rely on a lot of storage it pays to have really smart people building the hardware and software, and maintaining it, with service agreements in place. If 100 TB was as easy as buying a bunch of discs and slapping NASlite or FreeNAS on them then everyone would be doing it.
- DanBC 15y ago
  Not sure why that's controversial?
  - lsc 15y ago
    because nineteen grand a month buys you a boatload of hardware /and/ a really smart person. A really smart person that can also be used on other things. S3, economically speaking, is an incredible deal if you are only using a little. But if you are using a lot? it makes NetApp or EMC start to look good, which is to say, only a good deal if money doesn't matter. I mean, yeah, if you are in a situation where money doesn't matter, or rather a situation where the amount of money you are spending on the storage is trivial compared to what you are doing with the storage, sure, NetApp or EMC will deliver a far superior product. S3 may have it's uses too. But if you are doing something where the storage needs to be cheap? yeah, neither one of those players, nor S3 will get you where you want to go.

by dmk23 15y ago

beagle3 15y ago

Well, space, air conditioning electricity and redundancy comparable to what Amazon offers would add a few thousands per month (I guess $2000-$5000, depending on where you are). Still, way cheaper than Amazon, but there are nontrivial running costs beyond the purchase and build price.

moe 15y ago
You should be able to rent half a rack with sufficient power to house this for around $1000/mo in just about any civilized datacenter.
- lsc 15y ago
  I'd love to sell you a half rack and a 20a circuit for a grand a month. That's high even here in the sf bay area.

DanBC 15y ago

No. If you rely on a lot of storage it pays to have really smart people building the hardware and software, and maintaining it, with service agreements in place. If 100 TB was as easy as buying a bunch of discs and slapping NASlite or FreeNAS on them then everyone would be doing it.

DanBC 15y ago
Not sure why that's controversial?
- lsc 15y ago
  because nineteen grand a month buys you a boatload of hardware /and/ a really smart person. A really smart person that can also be used on other things. S3, economically speaking, is an incredible deal if you are only using a little. But if you are using a lot? it makes NetApp or EMC start to look good, which is to say, only a good deal if money doesn't matter. I mean, yeah, if you are in a situation where money doesn't matter, or rather a situation where the amount of money you are spending on the storage is trivial compared to what you are doing with the storage, sure, NetApp or EMC will deliver a far superior product. S3 may have it's uses too. But if you are doing something where the storage needs to be cheap? yeah, neither one of those players, nor S3 will get you where you want to go.