back to article Like an everflowing stream: New tech promises remote S3 nearline disk performance

You can't store files in Amazon's public cloud, access them on-premises, and expect local disk access performance. You can store them in a sync-and-share facility like Box and Dropbox but then they have to be downloaded completely. It's not so good for large files, large data sets and production environments. You could also …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I thought we passed the Hybrid trend

    Didn’t we have Cirtas and other startups that tried to do it & their business model didn’t sustain.

    Make up your mind if you’re on prem or cloud (for the various parts of your business).

    Going hybrid is usually the worst if both, not the other way around.

  2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    "they appear to have come up with [..] a faster way of streaming files "

    They're fiddling the books, storing stuff locally and playing with metadata workarounds.

    There's only one true way to stream faster : use a bigger pipe (and make sure the backend can use that increase in bandwidth properly).

    1. monty75

      Re: "they appear to have come up with [..] a faster way of streaming files "

      There’s also latency which has the annoying tendency to obey the laws of physics.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Aargh.. not more magic black boxes ....

    In a previous consultancy life, I had one client who was taken over.

    An aggressive little charlie uncle november tosspot turned up from the new headquarters, a location a mere 11000 miles away from the now satellite office I called home at the time.

    There was an impending office move for the satellite office. Mr Tosspot decided everything could be operated from servers at HQ, and so he specced up a tiny little comms room for the new satellite office which was little more than a glorified cupboard containing:

    - Patch panels

    - Switch

    - Router connected to a leased line

    - A very,very,very,very,very expensive compression blackbox of which Mr Tosspot was very proud indeed.

    Not a server in sight. Not even a paltry Domain Controller. Nothing.

    Bearing in mind that the now satellite office consisted of 80 people, I'm sure you can guess what happened next....

    Mr Tosspot turned up for the weekend of the office move along with a couple of his minions from HQ. I was not so politely shown the door and told not to return again.

    Not long after the office opened on the Monday, my mobile rings. Its the Big Cheese, the Managing Director from the satellite office .... practically begging me for help, any help whatsoever, because an office of 80 people was sitting there twiddling its thumbs waiting for files to transfer, for emails to arrive.

    I can't remember what solution I put in place. But it was hard work, because all the data was 11000 miles away and Mr Tosspot had taken all the backup tapes with him in his suitcase. I think it might have involved paying a courier a lot of money for a private charter flight (the business these guys were in meant that they were literally loosing millions by the hour, and HQ didn't have the manpower or expertise to act as a DR site for what the guys in the satellite office did).

    Fortunately this was in the days before VoIP, so at least their phones still worked, but they were of bugger all use to their clients !

    So forgive me if I exercise a great degree of cynicism when someone comes bearing a magic box promising me increased performance for remote cloud storage. Personally I vowed never to touch such stuff with a proverbial bargepole after my prior experience.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Looking at the eeewtoob "demo", three things stand out :

    (a) This is a one-to-one demo

    (b) This is a datacentre to datacentre demo

    (c) No attempt appears to have been made to throttle bandwidth

    So yeah, I guess you can stream Windows "over the internet" when you've got the benefit of a highly stable gig connection with barely any load on it ! The traffic in the demo is probably going straight over peering and hardly touching "the internet"

  5. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    tl;dr

    Backhoe.

  6. Reardo

    Could we... But should we

    It’s an object store and should be treated as such. It’s not block-friendly and isn’t meant to be. This is an admittedly clever hack leveraging the S3 protocols reasonably recent allowances for parallel multipart access - something I’m guessing they’d not be used for these kind of workloads. For that they’ve long had products such as cached or stored file gateway. You can even use fuse or s3fs if you’re operating out of your garage. Oh - data egress costs. That’s a thing. As is a Direct Connent pipe for predictable throughput and goodness.

  7. Milton

    Then there's the alternative ...

    Then there's the alternative ...

    ... don't be a short-sighted cheapskate: if you need on-prem speed, pay for on-prem. It's one of those fusty old-fashioned solutions ... that works.

    TANSTAAFL.

  8. James O'Shea

    You boys are far too negative. Just think of all the not-so-bright management types who will fall for this. Think of the way that they’ll get rid of their local staff as surplus to needs. Think of the absolute panic when it falls over, as it will sometime in the first week if not the first day. Think of the glorious fees which can be extracted ‘cause the ex-staff are now consultants and can charge what they like and management will have to pay if they want to see their data again... and if management doesn’t want to pay, think of the hours of amusement to be had watching them go down in flames.

    There are those who say that I have a bad attitude. I can’t imagine where anyone could possibly have got such an unlikely idea.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Tried it our - actually works

    Installed it as a data volume for an EC2 instance - worked a treat. I'm going to run it in my sandbox for a few weeks and see if it holds up, but if it does, I can see replacing a bunch of EBS disk.

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