Re:Ask HN: How would you store 10PB of data for your startup...
by spookthesunset on Friday April 23, 2021 @03:28PM
(#26918257)
> How often do you think they're actually going to get called in?
Not often. But the server gods are a cruel mistress and it will definitely shit the bed when you are on your honeymoon, or maybe the day after your first kid is born.
Re:Ask HN: How would you store 10PB of data for your startup...
by user5994461 on Friday April 23, 2021 @05:39PM
(#26919533)
>>> This person's entire job is managing a few racks of hard drives? How often do you think they're actually going to get called in?
How about every day?
Quick guess how often disks need to be replaced when there are thousands of them. ;)
Re:Ask HN: How would you store 10PB of data for your startup...
by Dylan16807 on Friday April 23, 2021 @06:32PM
(#26920000)
You can replace disks once a month or less. That's not an on-call thing, even if you do make your $200k admin do that grunt work.
Also for one or two thousand disks I would expect less than one failure per week.
This person's entire job is managing a few racks of hard drives? How often do you think they're actually going to get called in?
> Since redundancy is a thing, double that $350k.
True, but you can do redundancy for cheaper with parity or tape.
> And 10pb is what they have now so double it again for 20pb.
> So probably you are looking at a million dollars of capital plus labor to actually execute on this.
You can go a couple PB at a time if the upfront cost is daunting.
> Add in $10k per rack for switches, routers, wires, etc.
Yep, though that's not very much in comparison.
> Plus all the configuration management that needs to be built up. Not to mention monitoring. So maybe a quarter of work just to have it functional.
This is the one I'd really worry about.
> I haven’t even factored in opportunity costs. What could this business be doing that adds more value than building out a little data center?
You always have to keep opportunity costs in mind, but something like this can pay for itself in under a year if there's significant bandwidth cost too, and that's an amazing ROI.