North American Network Operators Group
Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?

  • From: Keith
  • Date: Tue Jan 09 11:11:39 2007



We have looked at Amazon's S3 solution for storage since it is relatively cheap. But the transit costs from Amazon are quite expensive when it comes to moving media files at a large scale. At $0.20 per GB of data transferred, that would get extremely expensive. At Pando we move roughly 60 TB a day just from our super nodes. Amazon is cheap storage but expensive delivery on a large scale.

Keith O'Neill
Sr. Network Engineer
*Pando Networks*


Simon Lyall wrote:
On Mon, 8 Jan 2007, Gian Constantine wrote:
I would also argue storage and distribution costs are not
asymptotically zero with scale. Well designed SANs are not cheap.
Well designed distribution systems are not cheap. While price does
decrease when scaled upwards, the cost of such an operation remains
hefty, and increases with additions to the offered content library
and a swelling of demand for this content. I believe the graph
becomes neither asymptotic, nor anywhere near zero.

Lets see what I can do using today's technology:

According to the itunes website they have over 3.5 million songs. Lets
call it 4 million. Assume a decent bit rate and make them average 10 MB
each. That's 40 TB which would cost me $6k per month to store on Amazon
S3. Lets assume we use Amazon EC3 to only allow torrents of the files to
be downloaded and we transfer each file twice per month. Total cost around
$20k per month or $250k per year. Add $10k to pay somebody to create the
interface and put up a few banner ads and it'll be self supporting.

That sort of setup could come out of petty cash for larger ISPs marketing
Departments.

Of course there are a few problems with the above business model (mostly
legal) but infrastructure costs are not one of them. Plug in your own
numbers for movies and tv shows but 40 TB for each will probably be enough.