

S4 - $12 for 1 year of 1 TB write-only storage - ulvund
http://www.supersimplestorageservice.com/

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clemesha
At the top of the page source:

    
    
      <!-- Ahh... I see you're a distingushing Internet user.  You're really a "check under the hood" -->
      <!-- type of guy.  I like that about you.  I also like how you really told off that bully-->
      <!--at the Christmas party... you're such a stud.  And have you lost weight?  You're looking great.-->
    

and at the bottom:

    
    
      <!-- You looked all the way down here?!  Let's hump. -->
    

Classic.

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tdm911
i like:

"Please contact us with any questions by e-mailing us at the address below.
All complaints and feature requests will be immediately stored using our
S4-backed user request database."

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stcredzero
They should have an FAQ:

    
    
        Q: I can't read my data!
        A: Good!

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crocowhile
How do you english/american guys pronounce FAQ? You spell it by letter like
CIA or FBI?

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gamache
Most people I know say "fack". I am American.

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mahmud
Most people I know say "Eff Aye Queue". I am an American.

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gjm11
Most people I know say "fack". I am in the UK.

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jwr
I started reading and I thought this was real. I've built one-way logging
systems in the past, where the link to a logging computer was a one-way serial
link, with physically no possibility of anything ever going back. This makes
sense in network security.

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ynniv
I'm somewhat disappointed that it isn't. I can think of good reasons for a
service in which data cannot be erased. If it could only be read on-site but
written over the network, it might be advertised using copy similar to this
page.

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fierarul
Or you could buy a licence for /dev/null which supports unlimited write-only
storage. No internet required.

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g__
And it's extremely fast:

    
    
      $ pv /dev/zero > /dev/null
      18.6GB 0:00:05 [3.76GB/s] [    <=>                                            ]

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tsuraan
The really amusing thing is that (at least on my machine) it's pv that's the
bottleneck there; I have it using 101% cpu, anyhow. pv will give me 9.7GB/s,
whereas dd will give me 13.3GB/s (also at 100% cpu). I wonder if anything's
faster than dd :)

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jacquesm
> pv will give me 9.7GB/s

Wow. What kind of hardware is your /dev/null ? Do you use striping ?

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StarLite
At first glance I thought it was some sort of backup solution, where storing
was very cheap, but restoring would be the pricey bit. As soon as I reached
the Abacuses and 3,5" floppies I definately knew it was a fake :)

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rapind
Same. I was even thinking: Genius! I almost never need to restore my backups.
If I can backup cheaper but still with the peace of mind of knowing that if I
do need to restore I just pay an extra fee.

I wonder if there's a real business model there. Most of us restore an
extremely small percentage of what we backup. Could you offer a cheaper
storage cost than other businesses and make up the difference on the small
number of restores that occur?

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alnayyir
Not really, all the cost is in storage and redundancy, the process of
reading/writing/restoration is relatively negligible unless people are using
it for media hosting like Amazon S3.

If you're really that desperate for cheap backups, you'd actually be best off
storing terabyte hard drives / SAN boxes around the country, maybe in colo'd
buildings.

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lisper
I'm not at all sure that you're right about that. The dominant cost of keeping
data on-line at the moment is the cost of the electricity to run the server
and the air conditioning. If the number of drives in active use is a small
proportion of the total number of drives then you might be able to achieve
real savings by only having active drives actually on-line. There would be a
lot of tricky issues (Where and how do you store the inactive drives? How do
you swap them back in when needed? How do you insure data integrity for off-
line drives?) but if you could solve those I think there might actually be a
business there.

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rapind
I also think you would save costs on customer support. You would have less
features after all. Once a drive / tape / whatever is full you take it offline
or power it down.

If you can get the entire operation costing less, then it's fine if restores
take longer and cost more... because you pass that fee on to the customer. I
for one would be happy to pay less for writes and more for reads, since I read
backups far less than I write them.

And it's not about being desperate for savings. It's about reducing the
overall cost of a commodity... storage.

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lsc
well, all you are saving vs. disks that are always active is what, 10 or 15
watts per disk? (we are talking low-power disks, I imagine) I mean, a watt-
month isn't free, but even at my scale, you are looking at about $0.19 per
watt for just power, $0.27 per watt month for power and rack space inclusive.
I'm still small enough that I rent racks from other people, so that number is
for the watt of power my equipment uses /and/ the watts the cooling system
needs to burn to get rid of the waste heat from that watt.)

I wonder if simply using the backblaze type setup with 'green' drives that are
set to 'power down' when not in use would be the best solution? In that case,
you'd want to minimize writes as much as reads, but it would make some sense
to offer a discount for data that 'just sits there'

On the other hand, I bet that when you buy power 'at scale' you can get your
watt-month prices quite a bit below $0.27 (note, you must roll in the cost of
both the watt your equipment uses /and/ the watts the a/c system uses to deal
with the watt of heat. At the low end, the provider bundles those two, but if
you build your own data centre, you need to be careful to build that into your
cost assumptions.)

The other problem with doing this at the low end is that where I am, I pay
full price for a circuit, no matter how much power I pull off it (the circuit
just blows if I get too carried away) and even places that do rent you metered
power usually have high costs for rackspace that are not metered, so really,
you are only potentially saving two or three bucks a month per disk, even if
they were idle all month.

Now, also, 'green' disks are usually really slow. 5900rpm rather than 7200rpm.
But they are also really cheap, so if your customers want to accept slow, you
can save quite a lot on your CapEx. Like probably half, if you use consumer-
grade 'green' drives rather than the 'enterprise sata' I use. Using consumer
grade drives has a bunch of other problems that your software will need to
account for, too... but that's a place where you potentially could have pretty
big savings.

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tybris
I bet they use multiple /dev/null devices in RAID.

~~~
someone_here
Their performance must be insane.

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jacquesm
In a way this is a variation on a very old theme, here is the original:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1360704>

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seanc
For all we know, they've got custom hardware which uses that chip! Maybe
that's how they get such fast write speeds.

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jacquesm
Let's hope they don't pull the chips out too frequently then (check the
graphs).

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Qz
They check in, but they never _ever_ check out.

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jacquesm
It's the Hotel California of online storage.

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elblanco
"Key Scenarios - Customer complaint database"

Hilarious. I know lots of companies that must use this service.

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strick
Funny stuff! Looks like a response to Amazon's new offering:

"We are pleased to introduce a new storage option for Amazon S3 called Reduced
Redundancy Storage (RRS) that enables customers to reduce their costs by
storing non-critical, reproducible data at lower levels of redundancy than the
standard storage of Amazon S3."

[http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-
new/2010/05/19/announc...](http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-
new/2010/05/19/announcing-amazon-s3-reduced-redundancy-storage/)

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jacquesm
Hm. April 1st was a while ago. If you consider buying, hit me up, I'll beat
their prices whatever they ask for.

~~~
stcredzero
Can you offer a transactional API?

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jacquesm
Hehe, tricky guy :)

Well, let's say that as long as we're talking about files _and_ there is
enough local free space I might be able to do that.

But once committed that's it, no rollback past that point.

Or I'd have to charge significantly more.

We'll take this on a case-by-case basis.

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stcredzero
Hmm, must be using a _very_ optimistic locking strategy.

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JoachimSchipper
Actually, not too useless for testing your outgoing bandwidth/latency.

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mwerty
Surprised that the paypal link is real.

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jacquesm
Why? It's the perfect product :)

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bprater
If you can never get your data back out, how is it useful?!

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jacquesm
Well, if I think about all the files on my harddrive, I hardly read any of
them on a given day anyway. If I work that out over the longer term there must
be plenty of files that I'll never read again, but still keep lugging around
with me.

I could store those in S4, free up some space and re-use it for other files.

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Maro
Great interview filter if you ask me.

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leftnode
Better filter for recruiters if you unfortunately have to deal with them. Tell
the recruiter you're looking for an applicant with S4 experience and see if
you get any resumes back with it. If so, you know the recruiter is altering
the resumes.

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stcredzero
Ask for 5 years experience, until 2015. Then ask for 10.

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ez77
Naive question: How do you recover the write-only data?

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uptown
You just need to reverse the polarity.

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rbanffy
Actually, it's a bit more complex than that. You would have to reverse the
direction the read device travels through time and then read the write device
when they intercept. Reversing the direction multiple times can make multiple
reads at different states of the write device.

Sounds feasible, if you have enough strange matter lying around.

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darrenkopp
this is awesome! i now have a GOOD cloud storage candidate for backups of my
blu-ray movies that doesn't cost more than the cost of a new blu-ray disc.

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gmlk
LOLROTF

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greyman
MotherInLawPhotos.com - great case study. ;o)

