Hacker News Reader

Comment by rlpb | Hacker News Reader

1TB doesn't take so long to upload nowadays. Isn't this product going to have battle with a new era where we just upload to a storage provider, the provider aggregates customers' stored data on a massive scale and so the underlying storage technology no longer matters?

I'm thinking about services like Amazon S3 and Glacier here, together with whatever competition appears. I presume that at this level, what matters is exabyte level storage hardware (perhaps a robot-managed room of archival discs or tapes). One where the provider can switch technology every few years, and customers never have to notice.

At capacities on the level of terabytes, we're getting to the point where upload bandwidth isn't so much of a bottleneck any more, aren't we?

View on HN

What? I don't know where you live, but I assure you that there are plenty of places where uploading a TB takes a lot of times (for example, it would take about 3 months with my home connection). Even using the average global upload speed (7.6Mbps[1]) it would take 12 days.

So no, I don't think this is going to battle storage providers.

[1] http://www.netindex.com/

I claim that people who have the speed of your home connection is not the target market. You may want one of these, but this kind of demand will not be enough to support the existence of this product.

Businesses have a choice: they can invest in buying storage hardware for a bunch of their computers every few years, or they can invest in a fast-enough Internet connection and outsource the storage. That Internet connection will bring them additional benefits over just storage.

I claim that the economics are switching in favor of the Internet option, and will continue to do so over the next decade.

> I claim that people who have the speed of your home connection is not the target market.

You know that you are talking about the typical speed of many industrialized countries, like Germany, Spain, France? I doubt those whole countries are not the target market.

Uh, he pointed out the average. For some of us first world countries where the average is even less it's even harder. That also fails to consider places that have quota limits as well as low-bandwidth connections, for example whereby I get 150GB/month combined down & up.

The economics maybe, but the political will is another story. The business that I work for will not even contemplate cloud based anything.

We use expensive 500gb tapes to take weekly backups of our entire site which are kept for 1 year. I'm not sure how many times the tapes can be overwritten but there would be a price-point for these archive disks that would make the tapes obsolete. It would also save a lot of space and therefore money as we are charged to store the bulky tapes off site.

The problem is that businesses don't always have a choice. Maybe big corporations do, but for small companies, you have to deal with that the locals ISPs give you. Where I live (Italy), unless you happen to live in a major city (and even there, the coverage is small and the best speed you can get is 10mb/s) the best you can get is a SHDSL line, which gives you at most 8mb/s for about 300-400€/month. And that's if you're lucky to have a central nearby that supports it, otherwise ADSL2+ it is (1mb/s). I'm sure this is the situation in most of the world.

There's is also the "political" problem (as outlined by everyone else), I can't see every company wanting to outsource the storage of their secret data. Then you're also at the mercy of Amazon, that for whatever reason can stop providing you service (It's a tiny possibility, but it's still there).

For the "Archive Disc" to be viable, it needs to still be viable several years from now. Despite areas with poor connectivity, connection bandwidth will only ever go up (and prices down), and it does so very quickly.

I know plenty of relatively small businesses in my area that use business-class asymmetric DSL connections with an upload speed that tops out under 40KiB/s. Many of these businesses are not in an area laid with fiber-optic cable. I have no idea how much it would cost to get dedicated fiber to a business in an area where it hasn't been pre-laid, but I imagine a nontrivial sum.

Small businesses still generate data that needs to be archived. Uploading a TiB of data at ~40KiB/s would take the best part of a year.

The economics are certainly moving, but I think it will be a long time before on-site storage is obsolete.

A reliable fast connection is still very expensive, and there are several other considerations. When we looked at offsite backup a major consideration was restore times. Even if you can do differential backups, in a disaster you might need to get everything back ASAP and even the best internet connection can't get near the throughput of onsite disks/tapes.

We have a company that employs 120 people. The fastest connection that we can get is 4Mbps down/1Mbps up.

Large companies are hesitant to upload backups of important and often secret information to cloud providers, even if it is encrypted (because who says their encryption will be safe in 20 years?).

This technology is obviously targeting this kind of customer, and I expect it to do rather well in that niche. Providing a cloud-like backup infrastructure internally is a significant cost, is rather hard to get right and requires a lot of maintenance over time.

There's a lot of people who still suffer with bandwidth caps. I have 3TB stored on Crashplan but I still get nervous about that. Companies have disasters or go out of business all the time.... I'm considering moving to bluray + bank safety deposit box. Depending how expensive these discs are, they may be an option also.

Even if you have enough upload speed, you have to account for Amazon failure (war, governmental decision, aliens etc) so I would use both cloud and optical media.

> At capacities on the level of terabytes, we're getting to the point where upload bandwidth isn't so much of a bottleneck any more, aren't we?

Depends on the from and to. 1TB at a sustained 100mbs is roughly 24 hours. Or 10 days at 10mbs sustained. If your data is actually written to disk somewhere, I doubt you can sustain more than 200mbps for most services?

So, if you record home video in 4k -- you're going to reach a practical bw ceiling pretty soon. In general disk usage is going up faster than bandwidth -- so archive media isn't likely to go anywhere.

As for Amazon Glacier, cost will come to 120-133 USD per Terabyte/year -- with an additional cost of ~300 to retrieve a Terabyte in 24 hours. For comparison, a 4TB usb3 external drive costs about 150 USD now -- and you'd break even buying 3 each year -- in terms of cost/TB (assuming you could store them for free, and spent the 300 on retrieval as needed).

Your Glacier comparisons should include the fact that Glacier is an actively managed service with very high durability[1] – if you're buying external USB drives, you need at least two drives simply to avoid single-device failures and that's before you get to geographic separation and the software + staffing to provide regular active testing for bit-rot, not to mention some sort of software scheme to prevent data from being altered after it's been written (malware, human error, etc.)

You can definitely beat AWS on price but there's a non-trivial up front investment required unless you're comfortable skimping on the operational benefits.

1. http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/ promises 99.999999999%

Of course. But you get three TB for the price of one on glacier (not surprising, considering they guarantee redundancy) with money to spare - per year of storage. So if you can archive to disk(s) and assume the disks hold for five years there's a pretty big difference in price (obviously, glacier probably will become cheaper in the years to come, but that's still a pretty big difference in the consumer spectrum -- for a business -- probably not so much).

It's definitely a significant savings if your time is free. I'd question how big the savings looks if you assumed your spare time was worth, say, $25/hour.

Maybe their target customer IS Amazon Glacier. Their competition is tape systems.

Try uploading 1TB with a bandwidth cap.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com