Upstart brags about cheaper-than-Amazon private cold data cloud Storiant is an object storage startup which claims its customers can use its technology to store petabyte-scale data in a private cloud at a price below public cloud storage. How does it pull this trick off? It has a customer, Markley Cloud Services in New England, which it says stores 11PB of cold data in a Storiant silo – as …
to beat public cloud object storage when your talking PB or more of data, that's quite a bit of (initial) volume.
object storage players have been doing this for years, not sure why this might be news. I was thinking maybe it was news because it was going to be a small scale or something but a PB of data is significant to all but the largest orgs in the world.
This implies a failure rate of 1 in 10^18
For availability: that would mean that the system downtime is guaranteed to be 32 picoseconds per year.
For data loss: that would mean losing one byte in every exabyte (= 1000 petabytes)
Anyone who makes such claims is a shyster.
With enough redundancy...
They've told us how much redundancy they use - just two copies of the data plus the ZFS checksums which, unlike RAID 5 checksums, can't be used to recreate a corrupt block or the content of a dead disk though they do guarantee to spot corruption. Given that stored data is merely duplicated, there's no point in more than duplicating the rest of the supporting hardware and power supplies.
Like others, I find 9^18 reliability claim incredible: the probability of simultaneous failure of the disks holding both copies of a piece of data has to be much higher than that. Put it another way, even the best fault tolerant kit, with every component at least duplicated and the system configured as a geographically distributed system don't claim more than 9^6 reliability, so whats going on here?
Price-wise, I can see a relatively large amount of data like this beating Amazon pricing. After all, they want to provide service at a profit, and past some scale nobody will have a "magic bullet" that radically reduces their costs compared to everyone else. If a service is bursty, being able to "rent" peak load cloud resources that you don't pay for the rest of the time changes this equation, but cold storage is not that kind of use.
As for eighteen nines -- that's a typo, later in the article they say eight nines. This still seems a bit unrealistic, but if everything's redundant (I think it is) and hot swappable, I'm sure it is plenty reliable.
Disclaimer i work for Cloudian . I just joined the company few months ago and I think Cloudian HyperStore solution really have a shot at success. Prices can go as low as ~1C/GB/Month (calculated over a 5 year term) by using commodity hardware, Erasure Coding and compression. You also don't need to start at 1PB, but you can start as low as few TBs. Take a look at this study made by Storage Switzerland http://storageswiss.com/2014/10/23/reduce-storage-tco-with-private-cloud-storage/
This might be just right as cold store for my backups. Two things I particularly like - low price and ZFS. However looking at the website, it does not seem they actually have anything on offer for individuals - the market specifically seem to be for "financial services, government, media, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and data center services". Oh well, perhaps a data center service will pop up as a retail branch ... someday.
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