Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by supdatecron 2289 days ago
Your numbers are way off, as you didn't account for redundancy of the drives (any failure or bit flips of 1 of those 2,470 drives will cause corruption of likely the entire data set).

> Network cards, bandwidth, electricity cost > I can't guess.

This is where a huge amount of cost is.

> And that won't be recurring cost.

Maintenance, humans, cooling, drive replacements, property, building, land tax, payroll tax are all recurring costs.

2 comments

> Your numbers are way off, as you didn't account for redundancy of the drives (any failure or bit flips of 1 of those 2,470 drives will cause corruption of likely the entire data set).

Let take another setup of same count as backup. Then another setup as back up of back up. ~150K

> This is where a huge amount of cost is.

Maintenance, humans, cooling, drive replacements cost > can't be greater than first time set up cost.

> property, building, land tax, payroll tax

Nasa runs on Government budget, I am sure they can claim some tax break there.

The point I am trying to make is, it may be cheaper to do in-house with the level of engineering talent they have.

The government should be running its own object store. And by government, I mean coordinated by Internet2/NSF with federation across all member orgs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2

Use backblaze pods, demand off peak bandwidth of gilded age megacorps that own said fiber for sync/replication.

https://www.backblaze.com/b2/storage-pod.html 480TB/4U

Have 3x sites around the US the build the pods, each new pod gets preloaded with a smattering of rarely requested and low replication count objects (as a redundant backup). Then shipped to the site where it will be used. Local writes go directly to pods which are then kept in sync with the rest of the cluster.

edit, from the TFA

``` And to put a cherry on top, the report found the project's organizers didn't consult widely enough, didn't follow NIST data integrity standards, and didn't look for savings properly during internal reviews, in part because half of the review team worked on the project itself. ```

His numbers can be out by many mulitples and still beat AWS's 5 Mil a month with no egress.