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Comment by Tsarbomb | Hacker News Reader

If you can setup HPC at scale you can setup Ceph for object storage. It will save you so much money in the long run.

I have heard too many horror stories about Ceph (and OpenStack) to be confident about that. I certainly don't think I can truly beat S3 on cost or performance at the terabyte scale for household data - and while larger scale would give on-prem savings there are also higher expectations (in terms of availability and performance) of a multi-perabyte storage array.

Really depends on your scale. At the Terabyte to 100s of TB level, you can solve most storage problems at minimum cost with NAS or ZFS on commodity hardware.

Ceph/Object storage comes into its own at the multi-petabyte and higher levels, which is not very many groups or institutions.

Solving storage at the tens of TB scale with commodity hardware is fine to a point (I have a ZFS NAS at home) but has much more ongoing maintenance burden than S3 and you need at least 2 copies for it to be a remotely comparable solution in terms of durability.

Ultimately you just have to design for what is important to you; I don't want to spend time managing this stuff any more, so keep a local NAS for my partner to access and put the bulk of my "cold" data into 2 different cloud object storage providers. Note that neither of these is actually S3; for business use I would absolutely use AWS but for personal files I can manage with the reduced capabilities and lower prices others offer.

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