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

Tue Jan 9 16:07:08 UTC 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.
>
>   