On Jun 29, 2010, at 12:59 AM, joel jaeggli wrote:
If the data you need to preload is sufficiently large (e.g. 10s or
hundreds of terabytes then yeah it should come as no surprise that
it might be more convenient to move by shifting around disks. 100TB
of raw disk is around $8000.
The cost of equipment is not the driver here, as you can presumably
reuse it.
Looking around, I can find a 2 Terabyte drive with a ship weight of 2
pounds. To ship this from Virginia
to Cupertino, California overnight by FedEx is $ 53.46, and I can mail
them back for $ 14.50. Assuming that "overnight" is a 24 hour delay,
this is an effective bandwidth of 185 Mbps. If I do this every weekday
for a month (20 days), I have shipped 40 Terabytes for $ 1359.20, so I
have an effective "work week bandwidth cost" of $ 7.34 / Mbps / Month,
which seems fairly competitive, especially as I can turn this on and
off as needed (e.g., I don't have to pay for Holidays).
So, depending on need, the shipment of physical media may be cost
competitive, as well as merely convenient.
Regards
Marshall
On 2010-06-28 21:50, JC Dill wrote:
Jonathan Feldman wrote:
I'm one of the reporters who covers broadband and cloud computing
for
InformationWeek magazine (www.informationweek.com), and it's
interesting to me that one of the issues with cloud adoption has
to do
with the limited pipe networks available in this country. For
example,
it's not feasible to do a massive data load through the networks
that
are currently available -- you need to FedEx a hard drive to Amazon.
Holy cow, it's SneakerNet for the 21st Century!
What's wrong with this? It's not feasible to build a network that
spans
many ISPs and backbones, capable of doing massive data loads, if the
demand for these loads (e.g. "upload all our data to a cloud
computing
system") is infrequent and usually one-time-only - which it seems
to be.
It's not as if there's a huge performance hit to using FedEx to solve
this problem - what is the benefit to the customer in having it all
happen within hours instead of 1-2 days?
There are other, far more often desired or accessed services (e.g.
video
on demand, video teleconferencing) that absolutely need high
performance
big pipe bandwidth, whose needs can not be met with FedEx.
Customers who
need to access or offer video-on-demand are far more willing to pay,
month after month, for access to a high performance backbone. Your
average corporate customer isn't going to be willing to pay
month-after-month for a super big super fast pipe (faster than they
need
for their everyday internet access purposes) just so that they can -
once - upload their entire corporate database to "the cloud" faster
than
they can FedEx disks to their chosen cloud provider.
Look at the business case (or lack thereof) for the service before
you
ask "why isn't this available". Unless/until there's a business
case for
many customers to pay for the service, there's not going to be any
purpose in creating the product.
jc
