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> The student persisted and kept repeating that "Dropbox has a bottleneck because it is a centralized storage solution, and the distributed solution doesn't hav

by menzoic 12y ago

> The student persisted and kept repeating that "Dropbox has a bottleneck because it is a centralized storage solution, and the distributed solution doesn't have that bottleneck". I couldn't believe my ears. The student is correct. Lets ignore the fact that Dropbox is actually distributed and say it is centralized because all nodes of the system belong to one provider. The only way Dropbox could have scaled to 200m users was tons of cash. In a distributed solution where each node is a provider themselves, each additional user could potentially increase the performance of the system. The distributed alternative scales much more gracefully without running into the bottleneck of needing more cash to buy more machines/storage/bandwidth. In this particular frame, distributed is most definitely always more scalable than centralized unless you have unlimited cash.

jrochkind1 12y ago
> In a distributed solution where each node is a provider themselves, each additional user could potentially increase the performance of the system. The distributed alternative scales much more gracefully without running into the bottleneck of needing more cash to buy more machines/storage/bandwidth. Wouldn't each additional user have to potentially buy more hardware to increase the performance/capacity? There's still a cost, there's still a need to buy more capacity to increase capacity -- you've just "distributed" the cost to the (organizational) nodes. Which, okay, can be useful sometimes, but clearly there's a huge market of people who would rather pay someone else to take care of it, than spend that same money (or likely more) on being a "provider themslves".
- menzoic 12y ago
  @jrochkind1 The type of distributed storage system that I'm speaking of relies on each node/user being a provider themselves. For an example checkout http://storj.io/ http://storj.io/
  - jrochkind1 12y ago
    I understand that, and I believe what I said holds.
    - menzoic 12y ago
      >clearly there's a huge market of people who would rather pay someone else to take care of it, than spend that same money (or likely more) on being a "provider themslves". There's a point that you might be missing. Similar to how you have people purchasing and maintaining powerful machines to mine bitcoin, you also have people using their spare HDD space or potentially buying dedicated storage to support the "distributed dropbox" system. The reason is that there is an incentive for doing so. You get paid for the storage/resources you provide. This adds to its scalability because any addition to the system is not only paid for but profitable.

by menzoic 12y ago

jrochkind1 12y ago

> In a distributed solution where each node is a provider themselves, each additional user could potentially increase the performance of the system. The distributed alternative scales much more gracefully without running into the bottleneck of needing more cash to buy more machines/storage/bandwidth. Wouldn't each additional user have to potentially buy more hardware to increase the performance/capacity? There's still a cost, there's still a need to buy more capacity to increase capacity -- you've just "distributed" the cost to the (organizational) nodes. Which, okay, can be useful sometimes, but clearly there's a huge market of people who would rather pay someone else to take care of it, than spend that same money (or likely more) on being a "provider themslves".

menzoic 12y ago
@jrochkind1 The type of distributed storage system that I'm speaking of relies on each node/user being a provider themselves. For an example checkout http://storj.io/ http://storj.io/
- jrochkind1 12y ago
  I understand that, and I believe what I said holds.
  - menzoic 12y ago
    >clearly there's a huge market of people who would rather pay someone else to take care of it, than spend that same money (or likely more) on being a "provider themslves". There's a point that you might be missing. Similar to how you have people purchasing and maintaining powerful machines to mine bitcoin, you also have people using their spare HDD space or potentially buying dedicated storage to support the "distributed dropbox" system. The reason is that there is an incentive for doing so. You get paid for the storage/resources you provide. This adds to its scalability because any addition to the system is not only paid for but profitable.