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Storage drives aren't 18-inch behemoths anymore. You can stack storage to your heart's content, or, rather, your wallet's limit. Don't tell me about how you pla
by causi 4y ago
Storage drives aren't 18-inch behemoths anymore. You can stack storage to your heart's content, or, rather, your wallet's limit. Don't tell me about how you plan to offer ten times the storage in three years, tell me about how you plan to offer ten times the storage per dollar.
- albatross13 4y agoGenerally it's been my experience that if you're paying for Pure Storage cost is your last concern. Personally I have years of experience with their SANs and they're a dream to work with. But I also never had to write the checks for them.
- SteveNuts 4y agoThey also have a very nice opex model. You basically tell them how much usable space you need (high water mark), and they will make sure you have that amount available. It also comes with an SLA for latency and they'll even upgrade your controllers for free if it goes out of bounds. I'm a huge pure storage fan.
- bombcar 4y agoMany people who deal with raw hardware don't realize that what the business wants is guarantees that shit is going to work, cost mostly be damned. And so that's how you get scenarios where you pay through the nose, but you've explicitly called out what you need and you get it, even if the company ends up doing weird things like shipping the top-end hardware (with speed disabled) so that they can make sure they meet the requirements.
- sanp 4y agoBut when you purchase hardware, are you not paying a lower cost than what you would to the hyperscalers?
- dilyevsky 4y agoWhen you buy oem drives yes, when you purchase from high touch vendor such as PS and proprietary tech then no
- bombcar 4y agoit can go either way and it entirely depends on your use case and what you need 4PB of cloud storage is probably a bit more than $800,000k and then you still have data "in the cloud" and not local to whatever you're doing with it.
- dilyevsky 4y agoAgreed. If you’re egressing a lot to other sites or have elevated iops reqs then cloud may still lose
- SteveNuts 4y agoThat’s debatable when you consider the performance you get from Pure. Our X20 which is on the small end, with only 10 drives can easily do hundreds of thousands of IOPs, supporting over 1000 VMs and a high performance ERP solution. The whole thing costs us about 50k a year. On an AWS/GCP that would cost a lot, lot more.
- riku_iki 4y ago> hundreds of thousands of IOPs that's like number for consumer grade ssd which costs $100?
- SteveNuts 4y agoSure, try running a thousand VMs on it though (which is an extremely random workload). A single sequential test at an optimal byte size benchmark for a consumer SSD is not representative of a real workload these arrays would see. Doing so is a lot more complex and intensive than what a single consumer grade SSD can handle. My point was just that if you wanted to get dedicated IOPs on AWS to match what you get with modern SANs, it’ll cost you far more.
- SteveNuts 4y agoIn this case, Pure will monitor your arrays for you and determine if the latency issues are coming from the controllers or the nvme subsystem, and they’ll either add more drives or swap out the controllers for faster hardware to make sure the SLA is met. It’s a pretty good system especially for CFOs who prefer opex model
- albatross13 4y agoYeah, they're fun to work with. Some decent open source libraries to interact with their APIs too. I really appreciate the effort they put into APIs for their appliance.
- hedora 4y agoGiven their target 66% profit margin (product price = 3x cost of goods sold), their $/GB compares favorably with any flash based storage that doesn’t use wide erasure coded stripes, even ignoring dedupe and compression. Not sure how they compare to other enterprise offerings these days, or how hard it is to roll your own RAID 6 open source thing with synchronous replication.
- mpsprd 4y agoStorage per dollar increases are usually correlated with storage density increases. Seeing news like this makes me confident we aren't hitting the limit of Moore's law for storage for a while.
- jonatron 4y agohttps://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ Has some sad looking graphs.
- acer589 4y agoThose aren't that sad looking. You can't go down 4 cents/gb when you're at 4 cents/gb. If you look at the halving period, it's pretty stable at 4-6 years.
- thfuran 4y agoSure you can. Just go to 4 cents per TB.
- rbanffy 4y agoWe are now below $.02 per gigabyte, at $.014-ish at single-unit prices for CMR drives, more or less tracking linearly that last leg of the curve. My guess is that there is a lot of price elasticity in hard disk drives (and that margins aren't as thin as we could hope - which is good, because it allows more R&D spending).
- simcop2387 4y agoYea spinning rust has been plateauing for anything other than SMR disks. A large part of that is that CMR (the old style) just isn't scaling anymore, even though it has much better performance and characteristics than SMR. Combine that with the fact that flash storage has been considerably increasing in density and speed (spinning rust disks haven't really increased in performance either) there's probably not as much investment happening in improving the spinning rust stuff the same way as it used to be. Flash still isn't quite at the same level of cost per storage but it's definitely starting to approach it and will very likely surpass it in the future.
- Proven 4y ago[dead]
- myself248 4y agoFurther more, density line _always_ goes up. Of course big things will be available years in the future. This is less newsworthy than "dog bites man". Tell me what I can buy _today_, like with an add-to-cart button, or go away.
- moviuro 4y ago> You can stack storage to your heart's content Unless you actually hit the maximum your building can sustain (heat, volume). Building datacenters is incredibly expensive, so reusing existing infrastructure and packing it with more is actually important.
- NoPicklez 4y agoHaving existed when 128GB USB flash drives were expensive. Naturally as the storage amount increases, the price per GB decreases over time. Consumers have been saying exactly what you have been saying since the dawn of storage. When storage capacities get higher, what you had before only becomes cheaper.