4 ms·
they don't really save anything on the connectivity, as everything would still be routed through Google, thus it would use exactly the same amount of bandwidth
by throwaway64 14y ago
they don't really save anything on the connectivity, as everything would still be routed through Google, thus it would use exactly the same amount of bandwidth as if the storage was sitting inside a data center.
As for electricity, the cost of packaging up and sending drive units to the customer + upkeep would dwarf the costs of electricity for the total lifetime of the drives.
I don't think this really makes sense.
- dullcrisp 14y agoAlso regarding the electricity, would that not be considered theft, if nothing else.
- derleth 14y agoI really don't see how.
- dullcrisp 14y agoIf they don't disclose that the box they gave you purportedly to record TV shows is actually also drawing power from your line and using it to run part of their datacenter? I would think that that could be considered theft by deception. It's certainly very shady. I'll admit that the line is a bit blurry.
- SquareWheel 14y agoIf they were to actually do this, they would of course disclose that fact. It would be written in small print, but still disclosed.
- lukeschlather 14y agoIt's recording TV shows, it's just also serving them to your neighbors. It's the neighborly thing to do.
- btilly 14y agoThe idea of a CDN is that you don't route everything through Google's data centers, you just pretend to and fetch from a nearby mirror. This really does save you bandwidth - a lot of bandwidth. Having some of the mirrors you use for this be in people's homes is an interesting twist that I had not thought of.
- throwaway64 14y agothe thing is the route to any "mirror" that sat in a persons home would be through Google's network. This wouldn't save them any money.
- btilly 14y agoIt does save them money, which is why every large ISP does it. The fact that makes it work is that not all routes through Google's network are created equal. Routes that go to and from data centers go a longer distance, through more pieces of equipment, and include busy backbones that you do not want to get overloaded. Routes that stay in a local neighborhood go a short distance and put load on one router which should be able to take it, and totally skip the critical backbone. From the point of view of the network operator, going to a data center is slow and expensive. Keeping traffic inside a local neighborhood is fast and cheap. Thus they want as much traffic as possible to go the fast and cheap route. CDNs cache data on local mirrors, and routes traffic to them whenever possible because that is faster and cheaper than going all the way to a data center. Every large ISP does this, and it would be shocking if Google didn't follow suit. But actually caching data on hardware that is sitting at customer's houses is an interesting twist.
- tonfa 14y agoYes, and putting a CDN node where the fiber terminates seems much much simpler (they might already do it for TV feeds anyway).
- nostrademons 14y agoWhy stick the mirror in the customer's home, though, where you have to mirror it once per customer? It basically becomes the same as a browser cache then. The logical place for it would be the local switching office (or whatever the equivalent is for fiber technology) - no idea if that's how it actually works, but that's where my naive knows-little-about-networking-besides-the-TCP/IP-stack mind would put it.