Re: Broadband initiatives - impact to your network?

[Marshall Eubanks <tme () americafree tv>]

On Jun 29, 2010, at 12:59 AM, joel jaeggli wrote:

> 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.

The cost of equipment is not the driver here, as you can presumably  
reuse it.

Looking around, I can find a 2 Terabyte drive with a ship weight of 2  
pounds. To ship this from Virginia
to Cupertino, California overnight by FedEx is $ 53.46, and I can mail  
them back for $ 14.50. Assuming that "overnight" is a 24 hour delay,  
this is an effective bandwidth of 185 Mbps. If I do this every weekday  
for a month (20 days), I have shipped 40 Terabytes for $ 1359.20, so I  
have an effective "work week bandwidth cost" of $ 7.34 / Mbps / Month,  
which seems fairly competitive, especially as I can turn this on and  
off as needed (e.g., I don't have to pay for Holidays).

So, depending on need, the shipment of physical media may be cost  
competitive, as well as merely convenient.

Regards
Marshall



> 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