Unlimited Online Storage - Where does the space come from?

How do these online storage providers get all space to allow users to
store unlimited amounts of photos or videos? What kind and size of
storage system is required to do this?

Either, they stack up lots of cheap hard drives inside or attached to pc's.
Or they buy expensive disk arays that are made by a number of companies,
i.e. sun.com apple.com etc. and thoes devices often connect directly to a
network via ethernet and they have there one operating system already
running on them and managing the file system.

"Billy" wrote in message
ups.com...
How do these online storage providers get all space to allow users to
store unlimited amounts of photos or videos? What kind and size of
storage system is required to do this?

Billy wrote:
How do these online storage providers get all space to allow users to
store unlimited amounts of photos or videos? What kind and size of
storage system is required to do this?


They aren't strictly *unlimited* as such - just that when they see their
storage filling up they just add another hard-drive to their storage farm.

--
| Brendan Gillatt |
| brendan {at} brendan \removethis// gillatt {dot} co {dot} uk |
| http://www.brendangillatt.co.uk |
| PGP Key: pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x6E265E61|

Billy wrote:
How do these online storage providers get all space to allow users to
store unlimited amounts of photos or videos? What kind and size of
storage system is required to do this?

There really isn't such a thing as "unlimited". Yes, they can keep
adding storage space, but if a user is really abusing the storage
space, they will shut down the account.

In article ,
"jd" wrote:

Either, they stack up lots of cheap hard drives inside or attached to pc's.
Or they buy expensive disk arays that are made by a number of companies,
i.e. sun.com apple.com etc. and thoes devices often connect directly to a
network via ethernet and they have there one operating system already
running on them and managing the file system.

Apple and Sun don't make those. Their RAIDs are much too expensive and
are nowhere near scalable enough.

High capacity RAIDs pack cheap consumer IDE hard drives into large and
very dense 3-D network storage grids. Layers of software go on top of
that to make it reliable and infinitely scalable. There's no complete
off-the-shelf solution. It requires skill and manpower.

I find it odd that some sites delete old files. The size of multimedia
files and the size of the internet grows so rapidly that deleting files
from a few years ago is hardly worth the effort. It's analogous to
reusing your old 1.44MB floppy disks when your camera produces 6MB RAW
files and your computer has a 250GB hard drive.



"Billy" wrote in message
ups.com...
How do these online storage providers get all space to allow users to
store unlimited amounts of photos or videos? What kind and size of
storage system is required to do this?

Billy wrote:
How do these online storage providers get all space to allow users to
store unlimited amounts of photos or videos? What kind and size of
storage system is required to do this?

I used to work on these:

http://www-132.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/st...goryId=2591917

or if that wraps: http://tinyurl.com/vwrbr

It might not look much in a 3cm image in your web browser, but that
cabinet is 7 feet high and needs a reinforced floor to handle its
weight. Plus special power supplies and very agressive cooling. They're
not that expensive: if you only need a small one you'll get some change
from a million US dollars. )

Enterprise level storage is often rather astonishing for those used to a
couple of hard disks in their PC.

Derek Fountain wrote:

Enterprise level storage is often rather astonishing for those used to a
couple of hard disks in their PC.

Interesting story from Wired magazine about the truly mind-boggling
amount of computing power and storage being marshaled by outfits like
Google:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...udware_pr.html

-- Ron

Billy wrote:
How do these online storage providers get all space to allow users to
store unlimited amounts of photos or videos? What kind and size of
storage system is required to do this?

Hi Bill,

There are a lot of tricks to provide very big online storage, of course
not unlimited - this simply doesn't exists on earth (as far as I know
).

Some tricks - like they gives you unlimited storage but limited monthly
transfer and
limited file size or they are just using compression on older files.
This compression is specialized to better compress some file types, so
we have sites only for photos (where .jpg and gif's are very good
compresed),
some sites only for mp3 or video.
I suppose that even email services like Gmail have compression and are
specialized in some files, like email with text, but have some problems
with exe's.

------------------------------
Regards, Martin The Vombato Mail Drive Team
Web: http://www.vombato.com/

These are what I was reffering to:

http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/


http://www.sun.com/storagetek/disk_s...a_center/9990/


They are not cheap, but one box from apple that is holds up to 7tb and a
single rack can hold up to 98tb.

Again the sun is not a cheap solution at all, but can go up to 330tb.

I would be really intrested to read about other solutions that can scale to
this level.

j


Apple and Sun don't make those. Their RAIDs are much too expensive and
are nowhere near scalable enough.

On 19 Oct 2006 16:04:17 -0700, "Bucky" wrote:

Billy wrote:
How do these online storage providers get all space to allow users to
store unlimited amounts of photos or videos? What kind and size of
storage system is required to do this?

There really isn't such a thing as "unlimited". Yes, they can keep
adding storage space, but if a user is really abusing the storage
space, they will shut down the account.

Not so with Smugmug.

http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/index.php?action=expand,9710

quote
When a company says they offer "unlimited" anything, I always take
that promise with a grain of salt, because what they really mean is
"we'll offer you unlimited resources until we start to lose too much
money on you".
snip
Apparently, not so with Smugmug. They offer unlimited storage
[...]
snip
Here's the message from a user named bl8ter that started it all:

"I am currently considering joining smugmug, but have a serious
problem. Over the last 2 years I have amassed 2484.98 GIGS (yes that
is 2+ terabytes) which is stored over way to [sic] many dvds. Now if
my calculations are correct it would take me 103360 hours, 12 minutes
and 4 seconds under optimal connections to load my albums. I have a
cable connection with a 60Kb upload rate."

And here's the response from Smugmug's CEO:
snip
We're happy to take your photos and host them, but we need a little
time to prepare. Just so you know, this is something like a $20,000
first-year commitment for us in terms of disk space, power, cooling,
and physical space. You'll basically have two complete RAID arrays to
yourself in our datacenter. Of course, you'll only pay your $30, $50,
or $100 per year, depending on your account level. Again, we're happy
to do it - but I want to be up front here and let you know that we
need to order some equipment and get it installed to accept your
photos.
/quote

If you want a discount code to use when signing up with Smugmug, send
me email. (Disclosure - anyone who gives you a discount code will
also get a referral credit when you sign up. :-)

jc

--

"The nice thing about a mare is you get to ride a lot
of different horses without having to own that many."
~ Eileen Morgan of The Mare's Nest, PA