Mega-Uploads: The Cloud's Unspoken Hurdle

First time accepted submitter n7ytd writes "The Register has a piece today about overcoming one of the biggest challenges to migrating to cloud-based storage: how to get all that data onto the service provider's disks. With all of the enterprisey interweb solutions available, the oldest answer is still the right one: ship them your disks. Remember: 'Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.'"

Comments

Pro photography is a huge problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Returning from a site with a tethered computer full of 80 MP 16-bit raw files from a day's worth of shooting would break most bandwidth bills if you tried uploading all these images.

Station Wagon Full of Tapes

[viking099]

Remember: 'Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.'"

Yeah, the bandwidth is great, but the latency SUCKS.

Backups

[SJHillman]

My last employer offered offsite backups to clients. For the initial seed, we always tried to get them to put it on an external HDD and ship it to us (or at least DVDs). The only major exceptions were clients that were also on FiOS - that was the only case where over-the-net transfer was faster than the backup-and-ship-it method for the initial seed.

Re:Second biggest challenge

[gestalt_n_pepper]

No, that's third. The second biggest challenge is believing that those fine hosting companies with servers hosted in lower Slobbovia won't have a few entrepreneurial employees who will *actively* be searching your data for all that is monetizable.

Bandwidth of a Station Wagon

[Surazal]

Yes, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of disks hurtling down the highway. The latency, on the other hand, leaves much to be desired, and I've heard the packet loss can be downright fatal.

Re:The real hurdle

[CAIMLAS]

That is just one of many of the hurdles.

Really, these problems are problems because most 'cloud' shit is done wrong.

It's a bit of a worn out record here on Slashdot, but anyone or any company which is fully dependent upon The Cloud for business continuity is a fool.

* First off, there is no such thing as 'utility computing', and probably never will be due to the volatile nature of storage and its ongoing cost of maintenance.
* Second, if you do not maintain primary physical control of something, to the best of your ability, you do not control it.
* For primary IT infrastructure, it will cost more to do "Cloud" than local. If you can afford 2-3 servers a year, but not much more, and a nominal IT operations budget, chances are you should have an in-house "cloud" with off-site replication.
* Bandwidth costs both ways will kill you, as will latency in many cases, will kill Cloud functionality.

At this point, I still strongly recommend against public Clouding your systems unless they are:

a) (very!) low volume with use-based billing. This only makes sense for a low-volume public-facing site where you don't already have IT infrastructure (on a cost basis)
b) off-site 'hot' replication. You've got your inside 'private Cloud' which replicates to off-site systems. (Cloud is basically just colocated virtualization, after all.)
c) Other geographic/distribution requirements (eg. multisite organization with none serving as a good central hub). In this case, colocation of your own equipment makes more sense in many regards.