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Ask Slashdot: Cloud Service On a Budget?
First time accepted submitter MadC0der writes "We just signed a project with a very large company. We are a computer vision based company and our project gathers images from a facility from PA. Our company is located in TN. The company we're gather images from is on a very high speed fiber optic network. However, being a small company of 11 developers, and 1 systems engineer, we're on a business class 100mb cable connection which works well for us but not in this situation. The information gathered from the client in PA is s 1½mb .bmp image, along with a 3mb Depth map file, making each snapshot a little under 5 megs. This may sound small, but images are taken every 3-5 seconds. This can lead to a very large amount of data captured and transferred each day. Our facility is incapable of handling such large transfers without effecting internal network performance. We've come to the conclusion that a cloud service would be the best solution for our problem. We're now thinking the customer's workstation will sync the data with the cloud, and we can automate pulling the data during off hours so we won't encounter congestion for analysis. Can anyone help suggest a stable, fairly price cloud solution that will sync large amounts for offsite data for retrieval at our convenience (nightly Rsync script should handle this process)?
the sales guy oversold your capabilities. Instead of asking about cloud options, why don't you just pick a server host with a good reputation (Amazon and Rackspace come to mind) and pass the costs onto the client?
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
Yes, your first line of defense is to examine what they need as far as these images, and that will tell you how far you can go in reducing their size for transmission and storage. Can they be scaled down? Can they be lossy? Can you take some time to run a more effective lossless algorithm on them? Is there redundancy between images? Secondly, do you have to move the whole image? Can you do your work on a lower quality image to define the series of steps required and then apply those steps remotely at their location? Just think real hard about what the requirements are, and don't rush yourself. You may come up with your best ideas in the shower on this when you have time to think outside the box.