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Comment by wavephorm | Hacker News Reader

I'm anxiously waiting for that moment where cloud storage becomes cheaper than buying a hard drive. Only at that point will consider I going all-cloud.

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Well, it certainly won't come from minor price reductions on Amazon. A dedicated server from here [1] costs €299/month for 45TB. The same on Amazon would cost ~€3400/month for storage alone. That isn't even factoring in the fact that the dedicated server also comes with CPU and traffic which you have to pay for separately on Amazon which would make it much more expensive still. Amazon's storage is also notoriously slow. Amazon would have to reduce their prices by more than a factor of 10 before they come even close.

[1] http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/xs29

As a heavy EC2 user, you have got to think about the performance ramifications. EC2 EBS disks are abysmal in terms of performance.

I keep wondering why Amazon doesn't fix this. The problem isn't so much the baseline performance which isn't stellar but can be designed to, but rather the massive variance in performance that arbitrarily changes moment to moment.

Arbitrary configuration networked disk is Hard, probably harder than anything else AWS does. Enterprise still spends a lot on storage (generally big hardware RAIDs, dedicated storage area networks, etc.). 1 GB of enterprise storage might cost 50-100x the base per-GB cost of the cheapest SATA disk, by the time you include all the costs. No AWS customer wants to pay that much of a premium.

You can often build a storage system for a very specific purpose more more cheaply (maybe 3x the base drive cost?), like the Backblaze pods, or just figure the cost of adding 4-8 x SATA drives and software RAID 10 to each of your servers, but then you get to try to solve the filesystem problem, and have weird performance characteristics. Plus, if you think EBS reliability is bad (it is), wait for the joy of statistically significant number of spinning rust drives in anything not designed with enough redundancy, and where some failures are correlated (trays failing at the same time, controller bugs, ...).

One of Google's big advantages was always their Google File System. And GFS is a lot better for the specific loads in search than for the kind of loads applications like gmail impose.

Local instance storage is really the only performant and cost effective thing. You can hang a lot more direct attached disk off your own server than off any AWS instance (1.7TB).

The other area where AWS kind of falls down is "mad RAM" servers. I can buy 288GB RAM servers (18-slot) cheaply now (well, 144GB is cheap, 288GB is less so), and 2TB RAM is available (64-slot). AWS tops out at 68GB for about 5x the lease payments on these servers (so maybe 2x the loaded cost after Reserved Instance discounts)

Moving from MySQL on EBS to a Cassandra cluster on locally-attached ephemeral storage was the first time I was happy with a database on EC2.

EBS is convenient as a permanent root for instances, but for anything that actually uses the disk, it's a pain train. I think of it as a large "pen-drive" for the cloud these days.

It's a hard problem to solve, because you're selling disk based on capacity. Problem is, capacity is easy to figure out, but capacity at a specific performance profile is hard.

In an enterprise datacenter, a "fast" Tier-1 or Tier-2 SAN runs anywhere from $10-40/GB/Year to the end user. A "cheap" (and much slower) Tier-3 SAN runs anywhere from $1-15/GB, depending on utilization, availability, etc.

I don't think even those rates are possible with Amazon (with the exception of S3 object storage), because they don't know anything about their users. In the enterprise, you segment your users based on anticipated peak performance requirements. Amazon has no idea what your performance profile is -- and no idea whether it will change tomorrow.

Wondering that too. I really like the idea of having hosting in the cloud. But I'm not going to move anything critical there until the storage gets better and more predictable. All these stories you read about having to stripe several EBS volumes together to get even half-decent performance seems to add a lot of complexity/extra engineering for something that ought to just work out of the box. Seems to me that its unlikely that EBS will be any good until their entire infrastructure gets upgraded to 10gbit ethernet.

Meanwhile we still have 1 1/2 year left on our current 3 year datacenter contract(we run on 6 server vmware setup hooked up to a hitachi SAN on which we rent storage space). So Amazon have around 1 year left to come up with some good reasons for us to switch. Otherwise we will probably just grab another 3 years with the current provider.

From hearsay (I don't have direct knowledge) EBS is an EMC SAN solution. So Amazon can't really do anything directly to fix this. They probably have put pressure on EMC for years.

I'm waiting for the moment where a cloud machine with extremely modest specs and traffic becomes as cheap as running a junkyard PC from my basement.

Junkyard PC's are always cheap, but I keep thinking with economies of scale they'd be able to carve out 64MB RAM/2GB disk/100MHz for $10-20/year.

lowendbox.com is your friend for that kind of stuff

Google Docs storage is $0.25 / GB * year. A random 1TB drive on Newegg was $0.17 / GB. Depending on you utilization and amortization schedule, it may be worth it.

$170? That's a damned expensive 1TB HDD. Most are under $130, and that's still inflated due to Thailand.

Also, 1TB hasn't been the sweet spot for a while. 2TB drives are coming in under $140 now, $0.07/GB.

3TB squeaking in just under that too, $0.65/GB:

http://ncix.com/products/?sku=67447&vpn=WD30EZRS&man...

Before the Thailand floods, I was eyeing that drive for $130 ($0.04/GB) and thinking "can't go wrong waiting until I really need it."

And obviously, comparing to cloud strictly on price, you can divide that cost by the number of years you expect to keep that drive... so then it likely drops to less than 1 cent per GB per year.

*$0.065/GB

> $170? That's a damned expensive 1TB HDD.

Google's price includes the electricity to run the disk, any enclosures, network connectivity, whatever CPU is needed to front end it, dealing with any warranty & maintenance issues, backups and backup media and who knows how many other items in addition to the bare metal.

If you want to do an apples to apples price comparison then some of those factors should also be factored in to the NewEgg price!

Not to mention redundancy - Google certainly do not store your docs on one hard drive.

So long as the cloud-storage provider also needs to buy hard drives, that day will probably never come.

Even if the provider can get better discounts buying in bulk (which won't be very much, storage is a commodity with thin margins), he's paying for a lot more than just the storage hardware.

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