Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?
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@JaredBusch said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
Conversely, if you only need 5TB total on AetherStore, that means you only 1.5TB or so on the NAS.
5TB Raw on AetherStore with quad redundancy is 1.25TB usable space.
If you had 1.5TB on a NAS, that would imply that you are comparing quad copy, quad node AetherStore to a single NAS unit with no RAID and no node redundancy. So not even kind of comparable.
For a single NAS to have any RAID protection on that, you are up to 2.5TB minimum. If you want a second NAS to get minimal node redundancy, you are up to 3.75TB minimum. To be on par to any degree with the AetherStore approach you need 5TB minimum with the NAS.
Both have their benefits and caveats, but overall, the reliability is roughly the same only when the redundancy is the same. The NAS has the advantage of local rebuilds with the drive replacement and the "design" to be always on. The AetherStore has the benefit of auto-rebalancing during a node loss and multi-node rebuild of a replaced failed node plus twice the nodal redundancy.
In this price range, we are talking about prosumer, non-redundant component NAS units. The uptime of these is not really different than a normal desktop. Good policies around desktop management can alone make all of the difference as to overall reliability.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
After that I would have to spend a lot more on purchasing new drives than just purchasing a NAS and drives to get my 5 TB of quad'ed storage.
Would you? The base cost of the NAS units with no drives at all is $500, roughly. And the NAS units have to have a lot of new, big drives to handle the capacity.
With AetherStore, you have the monthly cost but not the $500 capex spend up front and you only need to buy drives to make up the difference between what you have currently and your 5TB plus redundancy.
So with the NAS, you need to buy 20TB of drives for 5TB usable (assuming normal RAID usage.) With AetherStore you need 20TB - Your current capacity of drives. If you have 10TB now, you need only 10TB more. If you have 18TB now, you need only 2TB more.
I used my specific example as a way of showing it wouldnt be cost effective... I currently have 3 TB at four copies of data... So sure adding two more TB would require me deploying four 2 TB drives.. sure those are pretty cheap. I guess there could be cost savings there... Maybe.
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@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@scottalanmiller said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
After that I would have to spend a lot more on purchasing new drives than just purchasing a NAS and drives to get my 5 TB of quad'ed storage.
Would you? The base cost of the NAS units with no drives at all is $500, roughly. And the NAS units have to have a lot of new, big drives to handle the capacity.
With AetherStore, you have the monthly cost but not the $500 capex spend up front and you only need to buy drives to make up the difference between what you have currently and your 5TB plus redundancy.
So with the NAS, you need to buy 20TB of drives for 5TB usable (assuming normal RAID usage.) With AetherStore you need 20TB - Your current capacity of drives. If you have 10TB now, you need only 10TB more. If you have 18TB now, you need only 2TB more.
I used my specific example as a way of showing it wouldnt be cost effective... I currently have 3 TB at four copies of data... So sure adding two more TB would require me deploying four 2 TB drives.. sure those are pretty cheap. I guess there could be cost savings there... Maybe.
Or likely just two 4TB drives. Remember they don't have to all be equal.
But let's assume you need 4x 2TB. That's WD Red 2TB at $87 for a total of $348. That's over a thousand cheaper than the NAS solution up front. Any drives you add over the next four years would grow that potentially and the cost of adding one or two additional drives to grow in a few years would be trivial.
The breakeven point is somewhere around five years in that case. If you don't need to grow, the NAS approach might be cheaper around five years. But the AetherStore approach is far more flexible.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@scottalanmiller said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
After that I would have to spend a lot more on purchasing new drives than just purchasing a NAS and drives to get my 5 TB of quad'ed storage.
Would you? The base cost of the NAS units with no drives at all is $500, roughly. And the NAS units have to have a lot of new, big drives to handle the capacity.
With AetherStore, you have the monthly cost but not the $500 capex spend up front and you only need to buy drives to make up the difference between what you have currently and your 5TB plus redundancy.
So with the NAS, you need to buy 20TB of drives for 5TB usable (assuming normal RAID usage.) With AetherStore you need 20TB - Your current capacity of drives. If you have 10TB now, you need only 10TB more. If you have 18TB now, you need only 2TB more.
I used my specific example as a way of showing it wouldnt be cost effective... I currently have 3 TB at four copies of data... So sure adding two more TB would require me deploying four 2 TB drives.. sure those are pretty cheap. I guess there could be cost savings there... Maybe.
Or likely just two 4TB drives. Remember they don't have to all be equal.
But let's assume you need 4x 2TB. That's WD Red 2TB at $87 for a total of $348. That's over a thousand cheaper than the NAS solution up front. Any drives you add over the next four years would grow that potentially and the cost of adding one or two additional drives to grow in a few years would be trivial.
The breakeven point is somewhere around five years in that case. If you don't need to grow, the NAS approach might be cheaper around five years. But the AetherStore approach is far more flexible.
The reality is that my replacement machines will have even smaller Drive in the currently do with new SSD drives going in there a 256 gigs instead of 500 gig drives that are in there now
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If you look at the cost today and consider that your desktop buying habits would likely change if you had AetherStore, it is easy to see how companies might often opt for the nearly free additional 1TB spinner in every desktop and get 250GB of protected storage per desktop added to the environment. If you are planning for that design, it can add up very quickly and economically.
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@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
The reality is that my replacement machines will have even smaller Drive in the currently do with new SSD drives going in there a 256 gigs instead of 500 gig drives that are in there now
How long is that likely to last? That's what you are replacing with today, but SSD sizes have been going up pretty quickly. And until they go up a lot, secondary hard drives remain really common (and nearly free.)
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True, I'm curious what the extra power consumption would be on that
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@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
True, I'm curious what the extra power consumption would be on that
Its incredibly low. Drives are not big power draws, even spinners. We ran the numbers once for me and it was shockingly low, especially on newer drives. So low that it doesn't justify replacing drives before of it. I think SSDs save $50 in power over their lifespans or something like that. It's good, but not great. If the drives were a problematic draw, you would just buy fewer, bigger drives to fix that problem in all kinds of circumstances.
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BTW:
I have to say Aetherstore has some great staff. You can tell they really care about their product.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
So @BRRABill asked this question yesterday and I figured it was worthy of a little demonstration. First, for those that have not looked recently, here are the price numbers for AetherStore:
BTW:
What do you think most people use this product for? Storage, or backup?
If this is the official pricing, I am wondering if the 25GB lower "free" end should be higher. That basically knocks anyone doing backups out of the equation.
Granted, $10 isn't a bank breaker, either.
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@BRRABill said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
What do you think most people use this product for? Storage, or backup?
From both end users that I know and from speaking with AetherStore themselves, backup is the biggest use case for the product.
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@BRRABill said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
If this is the official pricing, I am wondering if the 25GB lower "free" end should be higher. That basically knocks anyone doing backups out of the equation.
That would be the idea. The free tier is really for testing and really basic stuff. If you want production backups, paying for support is probably a good idea.
Keep in mind that anyone doing DevOps style backups, 25GB is enormous.
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@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
My machines mostly still have HDDs in them. 500 GB drives. Probably 300+ GB free. If I ignore the laptops (yes I know Laptops can be part of it.. AetherStore specifically tested their coming and going as part of their tests), I have around 50 machines. Assuming only doubling of the data, that would provide me with 7.5 TB of space total.
Now the question is, what's the performance like?
I realize now that doubling of the data isn't good enough through.. As the OP mentions 4 times is really probably the lowest safety margin when using something like AetherStore. This is because of the completely unknown factor of people rebooting their own computers.
Toss in the fact that we use an application that causes the need for even more frequent rebooting, and even 4 might not be enough.
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@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
My machines mostly still have HDDs in them. 500 GB drives. Probably 300+ GB free. If I ignore the laptops (yes I know Laptops can be part of it.. AetherStore specifically tested their coming and going as part of their tests), I have around 50 machines. Assuming only doubling of the data, that would provide me with 7.5 TB of space total.
Now the question is, what's the performance like?
I realize now that doubling of the data isn't good enough through.. As the OP mentions 4 times is really probably the lowest safety margin when using something like AetherStore. This is because of the completely unknown factor of people rebooting their own computers.
Toss in the fact that we use an application that causes the need for even more frequent rebooting, and even 4 might not be enough.
Rebooting isn't an issue, it's resilient to that. It's prolonged downtime that is the issue. Four times is really quite sufficient in any kind of normal circumstance and less with any kind of control over the environment.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
My machines mostly still have HDDs in them. 500 GB drives. Probably 300+ GB free. If I ignore the laptops (yes I know Laptops can be part of it.. AetherStore specifically tested their coming and going as part of their tests), I have around 50 machines. Assuming only doubling of the data, that would provide me with 7.5 TB of space total.
Now the question is, what's the performance like?
A lot of the performance comes from the main access node(s), so if those have fast drives it can make a big difference, or should.
So is the proposal that the main access node have somewhere around 50% or more of the required space of the entire array so that hopefully most of the data is coming from a single point?
OK I just pulled that out of my rear.. but if not for some huge amount of cache on the main node, I'm not sure what you're driving at?
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@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@scottalanmiller said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
My machines mostly still have HDDs in them. 500 GB drives. Probably 300+ GB free. If I ignore the laptops (yes I know Laptops can be part of it.. AetherStore specifically tested their coming and going as part of their tests), I have around 50 machines. Assuming only doubling of the data, that would provide me with 7.5 TB of space total.
Now the question is, what's the performance like?
A lot of the performance comes from the main access node(s), so if those have fast drives it can make a big difference, or should.
So is the proposal that the main access node have somewhere around 50% or more of the required space of the entire array so that hopefully most of the data is coming from a single point?
If you want to treat the head node as a cache, yes, you could load it with fast storage, even give it SSD and even local RAID if you want. Depends on your goals. It's just one part of the puzzle so a question like this needs a lot of context.
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@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
OK I just pulled that out of my rear.. but if not for some huge amount of cache on the main node, I'm not sure what you're driving at?
If you have a four node system and four time replication, that means that everything is on the head node - it won't go out to other nodes for other reads at all. If you have four time replication on eight nodes, half of all reads (all things being equal) half of your reads will come from the head node. No matter what, it's significant.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
OK I just pulled that out of my rear.. but if not for some huge amount of cache on the main node, I'm not sure what you're driving at?
If you have a four node system and four time replication, that means that everything is on the head node - it won't go out to other nodes for other reads at all. If you have four time replication on eight nodes, half of all reads (all things being equal) half of your reads will come from the head node. No matter what, it's significant.
Sure, but these numbers seem pretty low. But maybe I'm missing something. I would anticipate that that those using something like this would have more like 20+ workstations. But of course, it is just as usable at the 4/8 node count as well.
But looking at the 20+ node (40ish in my case) now you're head node will have only a tiny fraction of the data on it.
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@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@scottalanmiller said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
OK I just pulled that out of my rear.. but if not for some huge amount of cache on the main node, I'm not sure what you're driving at?
If you have a four node system and four time replication, that means that everything is on the head node - it won't go out to other nodes for other reads at all. If you have four time replication on eight nodes, half of all reads (all things being equal) half of your reads will come from the head node. No matter what, it's significant.
Sure, but these numbers seem pretty low. But maybe I'm missing something. I would anticipate that that those using something like this would have more like 20+ workstations. But of course, it is just as usable at the 4/8 node count as well.
But looking at the 20+ node (40ish in my case) now you're head node will have only a tiny fraction of the data on it.
Overall I think that that is exceedingly uncommon. Why would you choose the head node to be one with so little free storage, for one thing? And how commonly do people need twenty or more workstations to get the space that they need? Most have HDs and are getting loads of space per machine, not small SSDs. The small space per machine issue is real, but not, I believe, the majority case. And once you get to any size, the purchase of a single hard drive to significantly speed up operations is nothing.
Basically, if you are so small that a drive is an expense at all, it's probably not a factor to you. If you are big enough to care, a single drive is essentially free.
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@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
But maybe I'm missing something. I would anticipate that that those using something like this would have more like 20+ workstations.
I don't know, but my impression is that what people tend to use is much smaller on average. But the bigger the pool, the lower the impact of individual nodes, too.
