You are under the assumption that only Ceph (and similar complex software) requires staff, whereas plain 30 PB can be operated basically just by rebooting from time to time.
I think that anyone with actual experience of operating thousands of physical disks in datacenters would challenge this assumption.
we have 6 months of experience operating thousands of physical disks in datacenters now! it's about a couple hours a month of employee time in steady-state.
How about all the other infrastructure. Since you are obviously not using the cloud, you must have massive amounts of GPUs and operating systems. All of that has been working together, it's not just keep watching for the physical disks and all is set.
Don't get me wrong, I buy the actual numbers regarding hardware costs, but in addition to that presenting the rest as basically a one man show in terms of maintenance hours is the point where I'm very sceptical.
oh we use cloud gpus, infiniband h100s absolutely aren't something we want to self-host. not aws tho, they're crazy overpriced; mithril and sfcompute!
we also use cloudflare extensively for everything that isn't the core heap dataset, the convenience of buckets is totally worth it for most day-to-day usage.
the heap is really just the main pretraining corpus and nothing else.
How is it going to work when the GPU is in the cloud and the storage is miles away in a local colo in SF down the street? I was under the impression that the GPUs has to go multiple times over the training dataset, which means transfer 30 PB multiple times in and out of the clouds. Is the data link even fast enough? How much are you charged for data transfer fees.
Not really. Have spare drives on the shelf and use the "remote-hands" feature from the CoLo provider. Just open a ticket to have the drive swapped. Pretty easy. For remote server connections just use IPMI/iKVM and iPXE. Again, not too difficult.
The biggest hurdle is getting a mgmt system in place to alert you when something goes wrong - especially at this size. Grafana, Loki, monit, etc are all good tools to leverage that provide quick fault identification.
Assuming that they end up hiring a full time ops person at 500k annually total costs (250k base for a data center wizard), then that's 42k extra a month, or ~$70k. Still 200k per month lower than their next best offering.
I have four racks rather than ten, and less storage but more compute. All purchased new from HP with warranties.
Ordering each year takes a couple of days work. Racking that takes one or two.
Initial setup (seeing differences with a new generation of server etc and customizing Ubuntu autoinstallation) is done in a day.
So that's a week per year for setup.
If we are really unlucky, add another week for a strange failure. (This happened once in the 10 years I've been doing this, a CPU needed replacement by the HP engineer.)
I replaced a couple of drives in July, and a network fibre transceiver in May.
This concern troll that everyone trots out when anyone brings up running their own gear is just exhausting. The hyperscalers have melted people’s brains to a point where they can’t even fathom running shit for themselves.
Yes, drives are going to fail. Yes, power supplies are going to burn out. Yes, god, you’re going to get new parts. Yes, you will have to actually talk to vendors.
Big. Deal. This shit is -not- hard.
For the amount of money you save by doing it like that, you should be clamoring to do it yourself. The concern trolling doesn’t make any sort of argument against it, it just makes you look lazy.
Very good point. There was something on the HN front page like this about self-hosted email, too.
I point out to people that AWS is between ten to one hundred times more expensive than a normal server. The response is "but what if I only need it to handle peak load three hours a day?" Then you still come out ahead with your own server.
We have multiple colo cages. We handle enough traffic - terabytes per second - that we'll never move those to cloud. Yet management always wants more cloud. While simultaneously complaining about how we're not making enough money.
I don't think the answer is so black-and-white. IMO This only realistically applies to larger companies or ones that either push lots of traffic or have a need for large amounts of compute/storage/etc.
But for smaller groups that don't have large/sustained workloads, I think they can absolutely save money compared to colo/dedicated servers using one of multiple different kinds of AWS services.
I have several customers that coast along just fine with a $50/mo EC2 instance or less, compared to hundreds per month for a dedicated server... I wouldn't call that "ten times" by any stretch.
Small companies should go for the likes of Hetzner/OVH, which is still 10+ times cheaper than AWS.
AWS is for anyone with a fear of committing to a particular amount of resource use, but once you've tried both and realised the price and performance differential, you realize you can easily way overcommit and still come out ahead, so it's not actually that scary. Plus, nobody's stopping you from continuing to spin up EC2s when your real servers are fully utilized.
Hard disagree... I think these black-and-white opinions are disingenuous, lack important nuance and are often just incorrect.
I even have customers on $3/mo EC2 instances... the cheapest dedicated server on OVH is still twenty times more expensive than that. I don't think there's any way to "come out on top" with OVH in that scenario, short of maybe claiming that the customer is somehow "doing it wrong" by only paying for what they need.
And yes hetzner/ovh have $3-4 cloud instances too, but now you're just directly competing with AWS and I don't see any benefit to call one any better than the other.
Thanks for this. I agree, there seems to be some sort of resistance to building and maintaining a CoLo infrastructure. In reality, it is not too difficult. As I mentioned above, spare parts on the shelve with the CoLo "remote hands" support and a good monitoring system can lessen the impact of almost any catastrophic issue.
For the record, I have built (and currently maintain) a number of CoLo deployments. Our systems have been running for +10 years with very little failure of either drives or PSUs. In fact, our PSU failure rate is probably 1 every 3-4 years, and we probably loose a couple of drives per year. All in all, the systems are very reliable.
You are under the assumption that only Ceph (and similar complex software) requires staff, whereas plain 30 PB can be operated basically just by rebooting from time to time.
I think that anyone with actual experience of operating thousands of physical disks in datacenters would challenge this assumption.
we have 6 months of experience operating thousands of physical disks in datacenters now! it's about a couple hours a month of employee time in steady-state.
How about all the other infrastructure. Since you are obviously not using the cloud, you must have massive amounts of GPUs and operating systems. All of that has been working together, it's not just keep watching for the physical disks and all is set.
Don't get me wrong, I buy the actual numbers regarding hardware costs, but in addition to that presenting the rest as basically a one man show in terms of maintenance hours is the point where I'm very sceptical.
oh we use cloud gpus, infiniband h100s absolutely aren't something we want to self-host. not aws tho, they're crazy overpriced; mithril and sfcompute!
we also use cloudflare extensively for everything that isn't the core heap dataset, the convenience of buckets is totally worth it for most day-to-day usage.
the heap is really just the main pretraining corpus and nothing else.
How is it going to work when the GPU is in the cloud and the storage is miles away in a local colo in SF down the street? I was under the impression that the GPUs has to go multiple times over the training dataset, which means transfer 30 PB multiple times in and out of the clouds. Is the data link even fast enough? How much are you charged for data transfer fees.
Not really. Have spare drives on the shelf and use the "remote-hands" feature from the CoLo provider. Just open a ticket to have the drive swapped. Pretty easy. For remote server connections just use IPMI/iKVM and iPXE. Again, not too difficult.
The biggest hurdle is getting a mgmt system in place to alert you when something goes wrong - especially at this size. Grafana, Loki, monit, etc are all good tools to leverage that provide quick fault identification.
Assuming that they end up hiring a full time ops person at 500k annually total costs (250k base for a data center wizard), then that's 42k extra a month, or ~$70k. Still 200k per month lower than their next best offering.
It's really not necessary.
I have four racks rather than ten, and less storage but more compute. All purchased new from HP with warranties.
Ordering each year takes a couple of days work. Racking that takes one or two.
Initial setup (seeing differences with a new generation of server etc and customizing Ubuntu autoinstallation) is done in a day.
So that's a week per year for setup.
If we are really unlucky, add another week for a strange failure. (This happened once in the 10 years I've been doing this, a CPU needed replacement by the HP engineer.)
I replaced a couple of drives in July, and a network fibre transceiver in May.
So the drives are never going to fail? PSUs are never going to burn out? You are never going to need to procure new parts? Negotiate with vendors?
This concern troll that everyone trots out when anyone brings up running their own gear is just exhausting. The hyperscalers have melted people’s brains to a point where they can’t even fathom running shit for themselves.
Yes, drives are going to fail. Yes, power supplies are going to burn out. Yes, god, you’re going to get new parts. Yes, you will have to actually talk to vendors.
Big. Deal. This shit is -not- hard.
For the amount of money you save by doing it like that, you should be clamoring to do it yourself. The concern trolling doesn’t make any sort of argument against it, it just makes you look lazy.
Very good point. There was something on the HN front page like this about self-hosted email, too.
I point out to people that AWS is between ten to one hundred times more expensive than a normal server. The response is "but what if I only need it to handle peak load three hours a day?" Then you still come out ahead with your own server.
We have multiple colo cages. We handle enough traffic - terabytes per second - that we'll never move those to cloud. Yet management always wants more cloud. While simultaneously complaining about how we're not making enough money.
I don't think the answer is so black-and-white. IMO This only realistically applies to larger companies or ones that either push lots of traffic or have a need for large amounts of compute/storage/etc.
But for smaller groups that don't have large/sustained workloads, I think they can absolutely save money compared to colo/dedicated servers using one of multiple different kinds of AWS services.
I have several customers that coast along just fine with a $50/mo EC2 instance or less, compared to hundreds per month for a dedicated server... I wouldn't call that "ten times" by any stretch.
Small companies should go for the likes of Hetzner/OVH, which is still 10+ times cheaper than AWS.
AWS is for anyone with a fear of committing to a particular amount of resource use, but once you've tried both and realised the price and performance differential, you realize you can easily way overcommit and still come out ahead, so it's not actually that scary. Plus, nobody's stopping you from continuing to spin up EC2s when your real servers are fully utilized.
Hard disagree... I think these black-and-white opinions are disingenuous, lack important nuance and are often just incorrect.
I even have customers on $3/mo EC2 instances... the cheapest dedicated server on OVH is still twenty times more expensive than that. I don't think there's any way to "come out on top" with OVH in that scenario, short of maybe claiming that the customer is somehow "doing it wrong" by only paying for what they need.
And yes hetzner/ovh have $3-4 cloud instances too, but now you're just directly competing with AWS and I don't see any benefit to call one any better than the other.
Thanks for this. I agree, there seems to be some sort of resistance to building and maintaining a CoLo infrastructure. In reality, it is not too difficult. As I mentioned above, spare parts on the shelve with the CoLo "remote hands" support and a good monitoring system can lessen the impact of almost any catastrophic issue.
For the record, I have built (and currently maintain) a number of CoLo deployments. Our systems have been running for +10 years with very little failure of either drives or PSUs. In fact, our PSU failure rate is probably 1 every 3-4 years, and we probably loose a couple of drives per year. All in all, the systems are very reliable.
They mention data loss is acceptable, so im guessing they're only fixing big outages.
Ignoring failed hdds week likely mean very little maintenance.