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