5 ms·

If the disks only last so long, is it really so terrible that Amazon gets to keep the broken outdated junk?

Sanddancer 11y ago
Yes. One can build a system that holds a petabyte of data, fits in less than one rack, has multiple redundancy, for about a hundred grand these days. Multiplied by three locations, that'll get you to $300000. Add in another $35000 for three years of hosting at three different datacenters, and you get to $335000. Sounds like a lot, right? Amazon's even more expensive. Storing one petabyte on Amazon, at the slowest, cheapest, glacier level, will cost you $10000/month, so at about 10 months, you've paid a hundred grand. At thirty six months, you've paid three hundred sixty grand. Plus, you have no hardware to show for it, while amazon sells that broken outdated junk to a reseller to regain some of their investment. Had you hosted it yourself, you could have sold all that equipment off to refurbishers and resellers and regained at least a portion of your investment back. So yeah, it is pretty terrible to choose Amazon.
- khuey 11y ago
  Commodity cloud services (and pricing) are meant for the 99%, not the outliers. If you have a petabyte of data to store you should either be doing enough other business with Amazon that you can negotiate rates down or you should be rolling your own.
- sneak 11y ago
  It costs about a hundred and fifty grand annually (fully loaded, base salary 80-90k) to have the lowest end person who could conceivably keep one of these things running well for three years. n+1 means you need two of them in case one gets the flu. Tell me again about how Amazon's a ripoff, please.
  - Sanddancer 11y ago
    You're still going to need n+1 sysadmins to maintain the rest of your infrastructure. Maintaining a storage system like this really isn't much different for the day-to-day operations. So, yes, it's one more system, but you're already going to need those admins anyways.
    - sneak 11y ago
      You're also going to need connectivity, of course. We were doing an apples to apples comparison in a vacuum, I thought.
      - Sanddancer 11y ago
        That's covered in the cost estimates. A petabyte takes up about a half rack these days, and renting a half rack from a colo is about $350/mo.
    - ObviousScience 11y ago
      I don't believe maintaining a high availability system with proper checking is less than 3 hours a day of work, or ~10% of someone's time on duty if we're talking around the clock. So we're talking about $75,000-90,000 a year in salary to maintaining the cluster if you want 24x365 coverage (which Amazon provides), as you'll need 2 people per shift, 3 shifts per day at a minimum to have people in house, even if they're only spending 10% of their time actually working on that particular issue. In reality, these are unrealistically small numbers. Each employee will have a cost to the corporation of $125,000-150,000 a year. Employees of that caliber spending 10% of their time on supervising a cluster for a year is $75,000-90,000. I'm amortizing the amount of work over your 3 datacenters by imagining you already have the staff and only counting out the number of hours needed for just this work. So the reality is that you left off something like $225,000-270,000 in actual cost of running your own cluster from your analysis, because while it's not "much different", it is a few hours a week from at least 6 employees if you're really talking about running managed, highly reliable storage.
      - snowwrestler 11y ago
        I feel like these comparisons oversell the level of support that actually comes with Amazon. Yes AWS as a whole very rarely goes down, but instances have problems all the time, and who do you call? When you have your own servers and staff, even if they are just on-call with a pager, you know they are going to work for you on your problem until it is fixed. In comparison, the sentiment about AWS is this: better build redundancy into the application because at the server layer, you get whatever you get.

Yes. One can build a system that holds a petabyte of data, fits in less than one rack, has multiple redundancy, for about a hundred grand these days. Multiplied by three locations, that'll get you to $300000. Add in another $35000 for three years of hosting at three different datacenters, and you get to $335000. Sounds like a lot, right? Amazon's even more expensive. Storing one petabyte on Amazon, at the slowest, cheapest, glacier level, will cost you $10000/month, so at about 10 months, you've paid a hundred grand. At thirty six months, you've paid three hundred sixty grand. Plus, you have no hardware to show for it, while amazon sells that broken outdated junk to a reseller to regain some of their investment. Had you hosted it yourself, you could have sold all that equipment off to refurbishers and resellers and regained at least a portion of your investment back. So yeah, it is pretty terrible to choose Amazon.

khuey 11y ago
Commodity cloud services (and pricing) are meant for the 99%, not the outliers. If you have a petabyte of data to store you should either be doing enough other business with Amazon that you can negotiate rates down or you should be rolling your own.
sneak 11y ago
It costs about a hundred and fifty grand annually (fully loaded, base salary 80-90k) to have the lowest end person who could conceivably keep one of these things running well for three years. n+1 means you need two of them in case one gets the flu. Tell me again about how Amazon's a ripoff, please.
- Sanddancer 11y ago
  You're still going to need n+1 sysadmins to maintain the rest of your infrastructure. Maintaining a storage system like this really isn't much different for the day-to-day operations. So, yes, it's one more system, but you're already going to need those admins anyways.
  - sneak 11y ago
    You're also going to need connectivity, of course. We were doing an apples to apples comparison in a vacuum, I thought.
    - Sanddancer 11y ago
      That's covered in the cost estimates. A petabyte takes up about a half rack these days, and renting a half rack from a colo is about $350/mo.
  - ObviousScience 11y ago
    I don't believe maintaining a high availability system with proper checking is less than 3 hours a day of work, or ~10% of someone's time on duty if we're talking around the clock. So we're talking about $75,000-90,000 a year in salary to maintaining the cluster if you want 24x365 coverage (which Amazon provides), as you'll need 2 people per shift, 3 shifts per day at a minimum to have people in house, even if they're only spending 10% of their time actually working on that particular issue. In reality, these are unrealistically small numbers. Each employee will have a cost to the corporation of $125,000-150,000 a year. Employees of that caliber spending 10% of their time on supervising a cluster for a year is $75,000-90,000. I'm amortizing the amount of work over your 3 datacenters by imagining you already have the staff and only counting out the number of hours needed for just this work. So the reality is that you left off something like $225,000-270,000 in actual cost of running your own cluster from your analysis, because while it's not "much different", it is a few hours a week from at least 6 employees if you're really talking about running managed, highly reliable storage.
    - snowwrestler 11y ago
      I feel like these comparisons oversell the level of support that actually comes with Amazon. Yes AWS as a whole very rarely goes down, but instances have problems all the time, and who do you call? When you have your own servers and staff, even if they are just on-call with a pager, you know they are going to work for you on your problem until it is fixed. In comparison, the sentiment about AWS is this: better build redundancy into the application because at the server layer, you get whatever you get.