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> This is also following the concept that storage gets cheaper as time goes on. More movies = more storage fees, but I don't think this overhead is nearly as la
by jewel 12y ago
> This is also following the concept that storage gets cheaper as time goes on. More movies = more storage fees, but I don't think this overhead is nearly as large as some would assume.
For a million 2-hour movies, stored at 10 mbps, (plus another 10 mbps for other versions), you end up with 18 petabytes. That can be stored on S3 for $396k per month, or on 200 180TB backblaze storage pods for a $1.8M one-time cost, plus $30k/mo for 20 full racks somewhere cheap. I assume bandwidth costs would be manageable either way, since the vast majority of these films are going to be accessed very rarely.
Just back-of-the-envelope calculations from someone who hasn't worked at this sort of scale. If I'm off by an order of magnitude then it'd be impractical to store on S3, since the fees would be something like 1/4 of their current profits.
- ohyes 12y agoYou also have to factor in the pods/disks failing at N$/month and making sure the data is backed up in a redundant manner (more than 200 pods?). And skilled helper monkeys to swap bad disks. And electricity. You also probably want something that reads really, really fast, and is durable. And you don't care about writes. I'm not sure, but 45 drives on a bus sounds congested. Maybe some sort of fancy super optical situation. DVDs fit the bill but I don't know about seek time on them. (?). Anyway, the answer is laserdisc, the answer is always laserdisc.
- sfennell 12y agoAccording to their Wikipedia entry [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix#IT_infrastructure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix#IT_infrastructure], they are storing all the content on S3. I have to imagine that they have some pretty good contracts with Amazon though.
- fein 12y agoI would assume (and hope) that a company of that scale is using something like Glacier to hold rarely accessed data, so that storage fees aren't incurred on having it in a hot cache.
- SwellJoe 12y agoNetflix could not use Glacier for rarely accessed films, unless they wanted to impose a watching schedule on their users (i.e. "Bananas is only available on weekends", or similar, and even then, that'd impose even higher fees to move things out of Glacier and onto some other kind of storage). Glacier takes minutes to hours to retrieve files (I'm guessing hours in the case or large movie files). Just because it is "rarely accessed", doesn't mean it doesn't need to be available quickly when it is accessed. And, Glacier is priced for data that is moved in and almost never moved out to other types of storage.
- fein 12y agoI was not aware it would take that long to pull data out of Glacier. You learn new things every day :)
- autokad 12y agothat really wouldnt work. wait 4 hours to see what you wanted to see? for backup sure, but not for what they need to show customers