Comments on: Amazon S3 - Super Savings on Storage (but not on bandwidth)

By: Arik

Arik — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 10:54:22 +0000

I think that one of the strongest advantages of S3 is the fact that it can handle virtually any amount of traffic. So if your video sharing sites traffic peaks at certain times, you’re not effected.

By: Eran Galperin

Eran Galperin — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:53:56 +0000

Got me there Don I actually witnessed in my own little research that for storage only Amazon is great (read the name of the post :)). However, for active hosted content its pricier than the alternatives.

Regarding databases you can obviously store your backups at Amazon manually or use another intermediator such as Zmanda, but Amazon does not provide automatic rollback protection to your active database.

In conclusion, as I wrote in my post - good for storage bad for data serving.

By: Don MacAskill

Don MacAskill — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:25:07 +0000

When you’re dealing with hundreds of terabytes or more, backups and redundancy blur together, particularly when all of it needs to be online at all times.

Offline storage isn’t very cheap at all.

And lots of companies use Amazon for their databases, including backups, so they obviously do. It’s trivial to use S3 as a backup for whatever data you want, including your databases. Zmanda even offers S3 as a backup target.

By: Eran Galperin

Eran Galperin — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:37:49 +0000

What you are talking about is not redundancy, it’s backups. The N+1 redundancy is for uptime purposes - meaning a server could go down and you would still not experience downtime.
Regarding backups, I do not know the exact technical details, but we had some incidents where a programmer accidentally deleted a database table or a customer removed some files unintentionally, and they easily rolled back our data to whatever time frame we needed. Does Amazon provides rollbacks?
Note that this backup procedure also covers the database, which is something that Amazon obviously does not.

Relying completely on your provider for your data loss prevention is wrong in my view. Offline storage is very cheap and if your business is your data, you should store your data periodically on your own machines.

You might consider dropping ServInt a line and asking them about their data guaranties if you’re really interested

By: Don MacAskill

Don MacAskill — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:00:23 +0000

It’s not downtime I’m worried about - it’s dataloss. And it only takes once to be significant.

N+1 isn’t as good as N+2(+).

You should find out, for sure, how many copies of your data exist. I’d love to know myself. If they really do provide 3 copies in 2 different datacenters, that’s awesome. If not, it’s not a fair comparison.

By: Adam Benayoun

Adam Benayoun — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 08:50:34 +0000

On a different note, I hate sliced bread.

By: Eran Galperin

Eran Galperin — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 01:43:16 +0000

That’s why I put it with a question mark
Anyway, we’ve been using ServInt for close to 3 years now, and we had 0 downtime. While I’m no expert on their specific agreement, according to their website they provide N+1 redundancy in their data center, and a money back on downtime guarantee. I guess Amazon reputation must really be worth it to justify the price difference

By: Don MacAskill

Don MacAskill — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 01:30:28 +0000

Certainly not a marketing ploy.

I think if you read my S3 posts, and the slides I present at conferences, you’ll see that I say over and over that S3 is great for storage, but not (yet?) great for serving.

You don’t mention whether ServInt guarantees at least 3 copies in two datacenters - that’s a major part of the equation that’s often overlooked. Amazon does, so if data durability is important, other solutions can quickly get more expensive if you have to replicate storage.