nanog mailing list archives

Re: Broadband initiatives - impact to your network?


From: joel jaeggli <joelja () bogus com>
Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2010 21:59:06 -0700


If the data you need to preload is sufficiently large (e.g. 10s or hundreds of terabytes then yeah it should come as no surprise that it might be more convenient to move by shifting around disks. 100TB of raw disk is around $8000.


On 2010-06-28 21:50, JC Dill wrote:
Jonathan Feldman wrote:
I'm one of the reporters who covers broadband and cloud computing for
InformationWeek magazine (www.informationweek.com), and it's
interesting to me that one of the issues with cloud adoption has to do
with the limited pipe networks available in this country. For example,
it's not feasible to do a massive data load through the networks that
are currently available -- you need to FedEx a hard drive to Amazon.
Holy cow, it's SneakerNet for the 21st Century!

What's wrong with this? It's not feasible to build a network that spans
many ISPs and backbones, capable of doing massive data loads, if the
demand for these loads (e.g. "upload all our data to a cloud computing
system") is infrequent and usually one-time-only - which it seems to be.
It's not as if there's a huge performance hit to using FedEx to solve
this problem - what is the benefit to the customer in having it all
happen within hours instead of 1-2 days?
There are other, far more often desired or accessed services (e.g. video
on demand, video teleconferencing) that absolutely need high performance
big pipe bandwidth, whose needs can not be met with FedEx. Customers who
need to access or offer video-on-demand are far more willing to pay,
month after month, for access to a high performance backbone. Your
average corporate customer isn't going to be willing to pay
month-after-month for a super big super fast pipe (faster than they need
for their everyday internet access purposes) just so that they can -
once - upload their entire corporate database to "the cloud" faster than
they can FedEx disks to their chosen cloud provider.

Look at the business case (or lack thereof) for the service before you
ask "why isn't this available". Unless/until there's a business case for
many customers to pay for the service, there's not going to be any
purpose in creating the product.

jc






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