Dropbox slips 500PB into its Magic Pocket, not spread over AWS Dropbox has sucked the vast majority of its data off Amazon's cloud servers and into its own custom storage centers. This shunting of customers' files has been dubbed Project Magic Pocket. In a blog post on Monday, Akhil Gupta, Dropbox's veep of engineering, said his company has been an early adopter of Amazon S3 to store bulk …
This post has been deleted by its author
there's nothing in the open source community that's proven to work reliably at our scale.
Yes, it's simply outrageous that no-one has decided to use their own free time, and coding just for the love of it, to develop something that Dropbox can use without having to pay for it.
I don't think he was complaining, and yet if he hadn't said it there'd be a whole load of open-source advocates saying "why didn't they use HDFS/MongoDB/whatever... I built my home object store in a weekend it's easy" and complaining about them using proprietary technology.
I'm quite sure they give away more than 50 MB.
I'm not a freetard. I'd like to pay for their service, and have around 100-200GB synced over several machines. The problem is that their minimum paid plan is too much -- one terabyte.
I've tried Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud -- OneDrive keeps forgetting some files (and duplicating others), Google Drive asks for my password every few minutes, iCloud does not work across all machines I use. Dropbox works without a problem.
I don't have the resources for a OwnCloud system. I've been using a WD My Cloud sync app, it is working OK so far, but I cannot get it to connect when I'm using some wi-fi networks.
Why is there any surprise that they brought it in house? They require a physical storage for lots of infrequently accessed data. That requires infrastructure and costs no matter who physically controls it so they either pay some one else enough to make a profit doing it or pay for it themselves and keep the profit someone else would make.
I read a posting by some company who had some hosted hardware in NY, I can't remember who it was but I think I found it through El Reg though.
Interestingly their argument was that if you could justify the headcount to manage hardware and you had predictable capacity then outsourcing your servers doesn't necessarily make sense. Every argument I have seen about going cloud either boils down to two things: scaling/flexibility and/or administration overhead. Whenever I hear the administration overhead argument it is put forward by software people because, understandably, software people don't want to care about hardware.
But simply put, the costs of hardware and hosting can be cheaper than the cloud if you have the right economies of scale. But people should be doing more diligence than just saying "put it all in the cloud!" because they might not be doing the best for their business.
It should be noted that despite discounts, having 500PB on amazon probably wasn't cheap to begin with.
Also, amazon's infrastructure is on-demand only in theory.
If you potentially need to have lots of machines provisioned, you've got to pay for that privilege.
Same is almost certainly true for storage.
Yes, Availability vs Durability is the difference between temporary and permanent data loss. Four nines of availability allows for 4.5 minutes of inaccessibility per month (~ 1 hour per annum).
What I find interesting is that their numbers (500PB & 500,000,000 customers) works out to ~ 1TB/customer. Of course this is raw footprint, so there is quite a bit of protection overhead, but still that seems quite high.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
