Comments on: Parascale Promises Data Center Heaven: Private Cloud Storage At About $1 A Gig

By: Valentin

Valentin — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 14:48:39 +0000

for one the picture in this post is still broken – others have already noted that days ago. But, even worse, is this sentence: “ParaScale CEO Sajai Krishnan says customers can expect to pay about $1 per gigabyte” per month? per year? for the software license? Including what exactly – the cost of the servers? energy cost? the tech support? the software license?

By: PanMan

PanMan — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:57:31 +0000

That really depends on your application. For example, in video, for serving the files you want cheap bandwith, but for storing the original material, you mainly care about storage cost, since it’s accessed so infrequently. I guess they are different problems, and most providers are looking for a middle ground.
You could go either way: Really cheap storage, expensive access (long tail like), or expensive storage, cheap access (top 10 like).

By: Basil

Basil — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:05:19 +0000

In terms of scale, 500 TB is not that much any more. In my day job, I routinely (more than 3 times this year) help build out multiple petabyte systems. The scaling challenge is about the number of hard drives and the access times. 500TB is usually 500 1TB hard drives, and can be done in a single disk subsystem from most any major vendor.

Now if you’re trying to run something like Oracle on this storage, 1TB drives won’t cut it. Oracle has a multi-petabyte install in their main datacenter that uses smaller (but faster) drives.

By: Jasper Westaway

Jasper Westaway — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:04:13 +0000

It’s not the cost of storage that gets you (even current S3 prices are essentially free), it’s the data transfer fee that is key.

By: JP

JP — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:11:02 +0000

Wow, this sounds really interesting. Right now, here at Convos (http://www.convos.com), we use Amazon EC2 and S3. Later on though, we’re thinking that might have to change depending on how many online groups get started. There have been a lot of EC2 quirks for us.

By: RYK

RYK — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 09:21:44 +0000

it’s not fair to compare managed services like S3 with self managed, no matter how sophisticated the self managed software. That said, I think it’s about time S3 cuts some charges, especially on the bandwidth side.

By: Enric

Enric — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 06:57:55 +0000

Kimono’s open…

By: Raghu Kulkarni

Raghu Kulkarni — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 06:41:28 +0000

Erick,

We recently launched IDrive Open Storage Service (http://www.idrive.com/oss/ ) just last week that offers S3 like cloud storage with native webdav protocol support and at price points slightly lower than S3.

We plan to add native NFS and CIFS support to this shortly and make it a truly open cloud storage where enterprises can simply extend their existing infrastructure with access methods they already know.

We manage multiple petabytes of data for our online backup services IDrive and IBackup, so we do have the experience in managing large clouds.

just thought this might be relevant for this post. We are not a startup, but this is a new product that fits with our storage centric strategy.

Raghu Kulkarni
CEO
Pro Softnet Corp

By: Amit Bhawani

Amit Bhawani — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 06:38:50 +0000

@ Eric : You need to replace the ” with ”

By: Terris Linenbach

Terris Linenbach — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 06:21:56 +0000

Uh.. Lustre from Sun is free. There are other free software alternatives for Linux as well, I just think Lustre remains the best.

By: Prashant

Prashant — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 06:16:46 +0000

seems a good option… probably try it out..

By: Prashant

Prashant — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 06:15:29 +0000

The image isn’t getting displayed in the post(the back-end code is showing up)…See to it Erick…

By: wesley

wesley — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 06:11:34 +0000

Damnit why does this have to be a private beta

By: Amit Bhawani

Amit Bhawani — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 06:06:50 +0000

Seems to be a cheap alternative to my current data center!