In my mind, the MPAA is certainly the best choice to pay these costs. They're the ones with the problem, they should be the ones to bear the burden. Especially considering Megaupload offered to take the data and they explicitly forbade it. If the MPAA didn't like the solutions offered, but can't come up with something better, then I think Carpathia should get to do what it wants.
Edit: The opinion above has NO legal basis whatsoever. As many have pointed out, it's not even legally possible. I made this comment solely from a "In a perfect world..." standpoint.
The data is being held (from what I understand) as part of an FBI investigation. The MPAA may be responsible for the case existing and bringing the supposed crime to light but the FBI are the people trying the case and this is beyond the MPAA now. The responsibility lies with the government agencies.
The FBI, as MPAA's minions, should be the ones paying it. Either their "confiscate" the data or they do not. If they do, they have the responsibility to keep it up, if they do not, they should have to give it back to its "owner".
Unwitting puppets perhaps, but I doubt the people of the FBI want very much to be dealing with copyright drama. That's like fixing bugs in form code to them. It must feel like a complete waste of their time and talent.
Technically, I think Carpathia can recover their costs from megaupload, even with the contract being terminated. If megaupload can't pay, then the insurer(s) should step in.
There's no legal basis for the MPAA to bear the cost of storing the data. The MPAA is not even a party to the proceedings, which, by the way, are criminal and not at all civil.
So this confuses me a little, I would be glad if someone could explain it to me: why does the MPAA get a voice in the proceedings, if they are not a party to it?
I could be wrong, but I believe the government's position is that they have already copied everything that they want, and that Carpathia was free to destroy the data. If they are continuing to store it of their own volition, then they are fully responsible to pay for it on their own. Even if their reason for preserving the data is for fear of a lawsuit by Megaupload or others, that is entirely their responsibility if there is no Government requested court order in place that requires them to preserve it as evidence.
If they have been ordered to hold the data/servers as evidence, then the Government, as the requesting party, is solely responsible for the costs. If and when any party is found guilty at trial, the government can ask that the guilty defendant(s) be held financially responsible for all costs of prosecution, which would include reimbursement of these expenses.
As a matter of opinion, I agree. If someone claims they own something and they want to fight for it they should take responsibility for it. Property ownership comes with conditions and responsibilities. From an ethical standpoint, why should intellectual property be different? Do they own the data or not?
Expanding on this, if a company wants to claim that they always own a particular combination of bits should they pay rent for storing it on my system? The problem is people are generally short sighted and focused on the immediate future. Other considerations are rarely thought about until other people insist that something will affect their immediate future. There are costs associated with data that are rarely considered at the moment. No one to talk about this, it may change the way they do things and cost them money.
Backblaze quoted this price before the flood at $120 for 3TB. I'm not sure if post-flood prices are back to these prices or what range of prices you can expect at this volume.
This figure doesn't include redundancy. Backblaze uses raid6, so the usable capacity is actually 117TB per pod[1]. With this configuration the final cost should be closer to $1.6 million.
At that price, it would only take them 150 days to stop losing money if they started building some Backblaze servers (http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v...). 25,000TB / 135TB * $7,384 = $1,367,407 minimum cost of commercial hardware to store that much.
"historically and mind-bogglingly large amount of data" - you could say that again.
Did you read the article at all? They can't lease the equipment to anyone else, which is what's costing them money. The servers were estimated to be values at $1.25M, but they are also unable to lease all the space that they are using, which is significant.
Yes, I get that. That's why I said "stop losing money." It seems like their only solution would be to transfer the images of the data to cold storage and then find some source to recoup the cost of the cold storage devices (which is why I thought the backblaze numbers would be interesting.)
It sucks, but that's the price of doing business. They chose their customer, and now are (unfortunately) tied to consequences. Same thing happens to building owners who have a crime committed by a tenant, the leased space becomes a crime scene until the police/govt are done with their investigation.
But instead of just losing use of those servers, they have to actively maintain them. It looks like they just want someone to pay for the $9000 per day that it costs to keep the servers running, they aren't looking for money that they lost from not being able to use the servers.
To go with your analogy, sure building owners aren't allowed to rent the space back out, but they most certainly not asked to pay for usual water, gas, or electricity bills (because they aren't/shouldn't be being used).
I don't understand why this is the case, why can't they exchange the HDDs in the servers, tell the FBI to come with a big van and store the HDDs with the evidence on it themselves in some evidence room?
Still less than the cost of keeping all those servers up and running. I would think that from a legal point of view, like other people have pointed out, MegaUpload needs to cover the costs. They are essentially insolvent, so that is what you'd need to insure against. That it is related to a legal investigation, should not matter for the insurance coverage, imo.
Assuming 2TB internal HDD's at $120.00 per piece, you would need $1.5MM worth of drives to transfer this to. Not including the man-hours associated with doing so.
The $3.2MM per year is actually sounding a lot more reasonable to keep it up and running.
Agreed, I was doing budgetary napkin math here... there are a lot of factors, though it does seem that the 9000/day while MAYBE 20% higher than reality is fairly realistic.
* HDDs have some of the lowest margins in the components business. If you're buying from Newegg you're basically getting it at cost (unless there is some conspiracy by all warehouse retailers to keep the price at >$100).
* It's the chain of custody that is important not who keeps it. Most LEOs outsource to various contractors for all types of investigations.
I would pull out the existing drives, put them in boxes for the FBI, and power down the servers. As customers sign up for machines and storage, buy replacement drives and power up the servers with the new drives.
It sounds to me like they are looking for a way to keep their income flowing with servers that they will have a hard time renting out in the near future. In other words, they just got hit with a huge excess of server capacity that they are going to have a hard time renting out short term (and probably longer term as well).
Don't forget replacement RAID controllers! The RAID config is usually dependent on the exact drive/controller combination, so removing the drives and not saving the controller may result in them becoming inaccessible. At the very least, they would almost certainly not pass requirements to be used as evidence if that happened.
I really hope they weren't backing 25TB of data with RAID controllers, this is well out of RAID league and well into the territory of distributed file system techniques. I ditched RAID years ago for ZFS for only an 18TB file server at home. Start talking about thousands of servers and RAID is pretty useless.
That said, IANAL but I think the interesting thing here is that just making copies of the hard drives is likely not enough from a evidence standpoint. With such a data set there are likely layers of data abstraction software that would be need to be replicated to make any sense of it.
You can get insurance for "my client shafted me but I've still got bills to pay" but more typically I think you ask the client to post bond. It's called knowing your client. An ISP doing this much business with one client but not considering the possibility of MU going under is irresponsible.
Shutting them down could easily destroy evidence depending on how it's done. EX: Many redundant systems try replicating data from machines that are taken off line. What happens when the full network is taken off line quickly has probably not been tested.
The owner still has grounds, building maintenance, carrying costs from a mortgage, etc. Obviously the loss would differ from a strip mall with 10 tenants vs a giant commercial building with 2.
Third parties get f'd in criminal cases all the time. One of the asset seizure stories the WSJ recently covered involved a guy whose cash happened to be in transit with an armored car company. That was, until the companies assets were seized by the feds along with his cash.
Lucky for Kim Dotcom, New Zealand let him get a hold of some of his cash for living expenses. I'm not sure he'd be so lucky in the US. Carpathia probably should have had an insurance policy for this.
I hate to say it, because I'm as sympathetic to this ISP as anyone else. But this is what insurance is for. Big single customers are risks. Surely someone out there would have been willing to write a policy to cover unforseeable things like this.
If the insurance writer did their due diligence and realized the big single customer was MegaUpload (and what a large portion of MU's users were doing with the service), they would've been insane to write an insurance policy. I really don't think MU going down in an investigation falls under the category of "unforseeable." It was always a question of when, not if IMHO.
I can definitely understand the lost potential revenue of having unused servers. But I wonder why they are saying that cost includes power and connectivity for the servers? Seems like they would be powered down. I would actually have assumed the servers to be confiscated and taken off-premise by the FBI.
Any large datacenter has storage allocated in complex ways. IT may be challenging to isolate one customer's data physically from another. For instance, physical disks can be virtually concatenated then repartitioned into virtual storage containers, which may reside on part of 1, or parts of many physical disks.
They could of course migrate all of the contested data onto new storage. But its large; who would pay for that?
It is possible that all the incriminating evidence, i.e. the harddrives, are encrypted, but now are mounted and are hence decrypted. Pull the power and you might need someone (who might be outside the USA court's reach) to enter the password.
Pull the power and maybe all the evidence goes away...
Its the storage disks the government need, not the rest of the server hardware, if they cant come up with an agreement then shutdown all the servers, take out the disks, catalog, and put in a warehouse somewhere. They are now free to re-use the rest of the server for something else.
That would satisfy the needs of the government if they need access to the data, preserve it if in the future people are allowed to download it, and prevent the MPAA from complaining that it was given back to Megaupload.
I'm sure the cost of storage would not be minimal, but they could still use the rest of the hardware and not have to keep the servers powered up.
Possible problems:
- Maybe the servers cant be shutdown and brought back up without certain passwords or encryption keys
- Labor cost of shutting down and catalogging all those disks ( if done progressively would probably work )
People with legitimate file can't access them now anyway, this would not change that. I'm just proposing a way out for Carpathia while the case is decided in court.
Correct, but perhaps after this ends, MegaUpload could return the legitimate files. I don't expect the government to do the same. And I very, very much do not expect the MPAA to do the same.
The compatibility problems you have trying to get data off a disks in a hardware raid make it impractical (do you have the EXACT SAME version hardware revision & firmware; without this you can't guarantee you can read it back)? Its either that or you have to pay data recovery guys to rebuild it.
Not to mention hard drive costs are still high, post thai floods. For enterprise gear we are getting most quotes ~ $300 AUD a disk, for consumer gear its ~ $130. Most servers are running at least 2 disks... that $286K worth of disks alone if your talking cheap - low capacity disks, not including labour to change the disks and test the hardware before you deploy a workload to it.
Well as I said the could do it piecemeal (10 servers at a time or what have you) and it would require that the data (harware/versions/etc) for the source machine be archived with the disks. (good cataloguing)
Also $286K / $9k / day ~= 32 days, so in 32 days it costs them more to keep it all running that simply replace the disks.
Not to mention they could now lease those servers to another client and make money off of them.
Yeah, I think you would also consider that with a fairly standard equipment lifecycle program you would have 1/3rd to 1/4 of the equipment up for renewal in the next 12 months. Maybe you bring that renewal forward... and maybe you spec some nicer hardware (new Xeon E-5, etc) and are able to get a better consolidation happening so you don't replace everything.
I just wonder if they would be in a better financial position declaring it a loss and claiming the tax break / insurance then actually doing the work?
As long as they can support the hit to the cashflow, they are likely to be able to claim the damages back from either one of the parties of the case once its decided and / or insurance.
>The compatibility problems you have trying to get data off a disks in a hardware raid make it impractical (do you have the EXACT SAME version hardware revision & firmware; without this you can't guarantee you can read it back)? Its either that or you have to pay data recovery guys to rebuild it.
Forgive me for for sounding like a member of Anonymous but..
So? That's the government's problem. I don't see why a private company should be in any position where they're required (at wallet or gun point) to help in an investigation at their own expense. Pull the drives, warehouse them, and let the FBI do what they have to do. They have IT to rebuild the RAIDs.
Carpathia wants to be paid $9000 a day like they were before the Megaupload case started and pulling the drives and telling the FBI that it's their problem doesn't do that.
Pardon my ignorance, and this is a serious question, but why can't they just turn them off? I realize it doesn't address all the costs, but surely it could reduce them significantly.
While I'm obviously uninvolved, there are several reasons why turning them off might be a hassle. Primarily is that if anything is encrypted, the encryption key is currently in memory and the disks are already open - turning the servers off might require reentering details.
Alternatively, in a setup of this size, I imagine there'd be no end of redundancy configurations - RAID for individual disk sets, DRBD (/a SAN equivalent) across servers - turning them off would turn all that HA tech off. Meaning that, when you try to bring the system back up, the redundancy implementation might say "oh no, I've lost x peers from my set of n" and fail itself completely.
Shrug. I've no doubt explained it badly, but there are good reasons to keep them running. It's not just a case of "pop the hard drive out and use it elsewhere"; the logic associated with keeping 25 petabytes of data would also have to be restored to its current state.
In civil or criminal asset forfeiture, the state can conceivably confiscate property if used for or if it enables a crime. In some jurisdictions it doesn't even matter if the owner of the property and the criminal have really nothing to do with each other. (i.e. Your stolen SUV was used to rob a liquor store.)
Also, the government could have probably seized everything anyway as evidence. The problem with that is setting up that much rack space and network infrastructure isn't cheap.
That's Carpathia's basis for compensation. They are providing a service to the government. Seems like a no-brainer.
Making Megaupload pay this $9000/day seems unfair, too. The US government has cut off all of Megaupload's revenue streams, and so they would be forcing Megaupload to keep paying for a service that they can no longer make money from.
Regardless, why is the cost so high if the server is down? Does this $9000/day reflect the loss that Carpathia suffers from not re-allocating this storage to other customers? It would seem to me that given Megaupload's current state, it would be sufficient to leave the servers powered down and unplugged until the legal dispute is resolved... surely the cost of leaving a server idle is not $9000. I don't really know though...
The costs of moving that amount of data is crazy. I am surprised the government hasn't seized the hardware, and chucked it in a warehouse.
I did some back of an envelope calculations... and its absolutely crazy. Tape would require over 17,000 Ultrium tapes. Now you could De-dupe... but the hardware to process and dedupe that much data.... not really an option. Not to mention the time to write that many tapes...
Something like thumpers (48 disk sun x86 boxes) would be expensive, last time I looked they were around say $30k for a large order... 160tb usable assuming 4tb disks are the thumper is split into 4 Raid 6 arrays... thats 160 thumpers... 4.8 Million
Even backblaze pods would likely be well over a Million...
This doesn't even cover hosting costs, transfer and such. Not to mention to be usable in court there are going to have to be processes in place to document compliance and validity of the copy....
All in all not a great place for Carpathia to be in.
I know they dedupe on the file level, but I wonder if they are doing block level deduping... as without a big shared storage infrastructure block level deduping becomes pretty hard to serve at high speed from as the reads potentially become distributed across hundreds of nodes...
To build out web scale systems you generally use commodity gear and accept the overhead of duplication, heavy deduping requires massive IO, and there is no way i can see you can be dealing with that much data have that level of IOPS and be profitable charging what they charge.
This is why the US Government shouldn't have seized the site first, and asked questions later. They should've filed a trial against them, and let them keep hosting the data, and if found guilty, then take it down.
I disagree. Servers should be inaccessible, but not at all accessed by the law enforcement agency coming up with claims in court - why would they need to look at that amount of data anyway and why should tax payers suffer.
I know any legitimate hosting company would never do this, but it would be amazing if they just "happened" to have very loose security on the servers that hold Megaupload's data, and if some hacker were to..."gain unauthorized access" and wipe all the data.
They wouldn't be held responsible for a breakin, would they?
If a court orders them to take "reasonable, and industry best practice computer security approaches to prevent the data being lost", then, yes, they would be responsible for "accidentally-on-purpose" leaving the servers accessible. If it were to happen, someone would do a post-mortem, find out that they intended for it to be broken into, and then they would be guilty of contempt of court/destroying evidence/etc.
I'm really confused by this. Is Megaupload (or any megaupload employee) facing a criminal trial? How can any "evidence trial" (or whatever they call it) be maintained if a law-enforcement agency doesn't have the drives?
This seems like a very obvious case. If the government wants the data, it needs to come and copy it, possibly seize the hard drives, or if it doesn't want to do any of that but still access the data, it needs to pay the bills.
I don't think the EFFs claim here is actually of any legal merit. You have no legal right to access data you sent to a third-party at at any time, why would you even think that? Theres no "lex cloud" yet.
Are there seriously people that used Megaupload as their sole and only place to store their data? What if there was a fire in the server room? Or some MU intern typed rm -rf /?
Not backing up your important data is passive stupidity.
Backing up your data on Megaupload and then not keeping a local copy is active stupidity of such vast scale that I refuse to believe it has ever happened in the real world.
>Backing up your data on Megaupload and then not keeping a local copy is active stupidity of such vast scale that I refuse to believe it has ever happened in the real world.
To borrow a famous quote.. nobody ever went broke overestimating the intelligence of the public.
That said, having your backup service raided by LEO's toadying about for entertainment conglomerates was probably not even on the list of people's possible downtime concerns..
> Backing up your data on Megaupload and then not keeping a local copy is active stupidity of such vast scale that I refuse to believe it has ever happened in the real world.
The purpose of having a backup is so that you can restore your data after the original is lost, because there is a good chance the original will be lost. Explicitly retaining it on your local system is not enough to keep it safe. If it was, there would be no reason to backup in the first place.
If a million people used the service for backups, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect several of them to have a drive failure each and every day.
There are legal obligations for the government to reimburse telco companies if they are asked to spy on their customers on the governments behalf. Also, obviously, if you want to use data as evidence in a trial, it needs to be stored safely by the police and sealed off, to ensure that its integrity is preserved.
So either the government needs to pay up, store the drives themselves or dismiss these thousands of harddrives from the witness bench.
Also, I cant see how the EFFs claim has any legal merit. Theres no obligation for a site to enable you to access data you sent them.
"and argues that if that data needs to be preserved, someone else—the government, Megaupload, or an interested party such as the MPAA or EFF—should bear the costs of preserving the data"
Fucking exactly!! Have fucking MPAA pick up the tab.
EDIT: its going to be amazing (and will take years for sure) to see if this won't bite MPAA in the ass if the judge will rule that yes they do have to pay. Would looove to see that. This should be actually a rule of thumb -- if MPAA believes someone is infringing, court suit is entirely fine, but you guys (MPAA) will pay to keep the light on in the meanwhile.
What's the big deal? Just delete the data. Customer pays for storage. Company stores. Customer stops paying for storage. Company deletes.
Sure, a bunch of pissed off people will certainly be upset - but it's not the company's fault - they shouldn't have to bear this burden. I can't see how they could be sued by users for this, they didn't enter into any kind of agreement with the users, only with the customer.
Thing is - the company stopped paying because a couple of cowboys are currently checking if the town is big enough for them both.
Users don't care about that. Yes, some users are totally legitimate. Dropping their data because someone, somewhere thinks that the original service in general was 'evil' is not a solution that is as straight-cut as you'd like to present it.
This gives an idea of the economic activity generated by services like megaupload and what is being removed from the economy by killing the company. Roughly $3.2 million in hosting fees, and could be more if that's just the cost price. Also salaries, over $1 million in hardware, and the various other suppliers. One wonders about the GDP of the recording and movie industries relative to the businesses they're going after.
Amazon S3 would cost them roughly $444 per year, if they were using the Reduced Redundancy Storage.
The cheapest HD that I see on pcpartpicker (in terms of Price/GB) is the Western Digital Caviar Green 2.5 TB (5400 RPM) for $135.43, which is $0.054/GB. That's $54.17 per TB.
If you want a single backup, that's $108.34 per TB. Two backups (3 copies of each file), is $162.51 per TB.
So, if I'm doing this right, as long as their HDs last at least 15 months, on average, they have triple-redundancy, and the cheapest price ratio for consumer hardware. And I'm not even counting their power, network, cooling, or puny humans to maintain it all. That means their HDs, if they were made out of the cheapest parts I could find, would have to last significantly longer than 15 months, on average.
They're actually doing really good on price, if you ask me.
Or am I missing something obvious, or doing the math horribly wrong?
The math looks good to me. I think they are saying that it's costing them $128.41 per year just to continue to run it -- i.e. considering the hardware itself a sunk cost.
True. I'm honestly surprised they didn't declare daily depreciation, for $1.25 million in assets that are obsoleted by new technology at Moore's pace, I'd expect that could arguably be quite high.
they need to get a lawyer and work out the real cost. add in lost business opportunity, staff costs, brand damange etc. and you start hitting numbers where the government would have to do something and you may actually start getting compensated.
it is bullshit that they have to foot such a large cost for a government investigation.
Wait, why do they need to keep the power and connectivity on if they are not being actively accessed? That would same a bunch of money it they were kept off.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadEdit: The opinion above has NO legal basis whatsoever. As many have pointed out, it's not even legally possible. I made this comment solely from a "In a perfect world..." standpoint.
If they have been ordered to hold the data/servers as evidence, then the Government, as the requesting party, is solely responsible for the costs. If and when any party is found guilty at trial, the government can ask that the guilty defendant(s) be held financially responsible for all costs of prosecution, which would include reimbursement of these expenses.
Expanding on this, if a company wants to claim that they always own a particular combination of bits should they pay rent for storing it on my system? The problem is people are generally short sighted and focused on the immediate future. Other considerations are rarely thought about until other people insist that something will affect their immediate future. There are costs associated with data that are rarely considered at the moment. No one to talk about this, it may change the way they do things and cost them money.
I seriously hope that was sarcasm.
And is there any redundancy included in your figures? (25 petabytes / 135 terabytes == about 190 pods)
This figure doesn't include redundancy. Backblaze uses raid6, so the usable capacity is actually 117TB per pod[1]. With this configuration the final cost should be closer to $1.6 million.
So even if you throw out the rest of the hardware and have zero redundancy, $40/TB * 25000 terabytes = $1,000,000.
(Of course, somebody has to ship and store over 8,000 HDDs, too.)
"historically and mind-bogglingly large amount of data" - you could say that again.
To go with your analogy, sure building owners aren't allowed to rent the space back out, but they most certainly not asked to pay for usual water, gas, or electricity bills (because they aren't/shouldn't be being used).
Some people have mentioned insurance. Would any policy cover you for a customer being investigated for possibly criminal activity?
The $3.2MM per year is actually sounding a lot more reasonable to keep it up and running.
- if you buy HDDs in these quantities you will get a big discount (50%+)
- they most likely get the HDDs back after the case is finished, but not the electricity bill.
- you have to factor in opportunity costs from not being able to rent out that rackspace.
- I don't even understand how this can be proper evidence if it just hangs around at a private company.
* It's the chain of custody that is important not who keeps it. Most LEOs outsource to various contractors for all types of investigations.
It sounds to me like they are looking for a way to keep their income flowing with servers that they will have a hard time renting out in the near future. In other words, they just got hit with a huge excess of server capacity that they are going to have a hard time renting out short term (and probably longer term as well).
That said, IANAL but I think the interesting thing here is that just making copies of the hard drives is likely not enough from a evidence standpoint. With such a data set there are likely layers of data abstraction software that would be need to be replicated to make any sense of it.
Third parties get f'd in criminal cases all the time. One of the asset seizure stories the WSJ recently covered involved a guy whose cash happened to be in transit with an armored car company. That was, until the companies assets were seized by the feds along with his cash.
Lucky for Kim Dotcom, New Zealand let him get a hold of some of his cash for living expenses. I'm not sure he'd be so lucky in the US. Carpathia probably should have had an insurance policy for this.
I would have assumed that the FBI would have actually seized the servers, or at the very least pulled the network cables out.
Of course, I think the whole category of forfeiture law it blatantly contrary to the Fourth Ammendment, so what do I know.
Taxes?
They could of course migrate all of the contested data onto new storage. But its large; who would pay for that?
Pull the power and maybe all the evidence goes away...
That would satisfy the needs of the government if they need access to the data, preserve it if in the future people are allowed to download it, and prevent the MPAA from complaining that it was given back to Megaupload.
I'm sure the cost of storage would not be minimal, but they could still use the rest of the hardware and not have to keep the servers powered up.
Possible problems:
- Maybe the servers cant be shutdown and brought back up without certain passwords or encryption keys
- Labor cost of shutting down and catalogging all those disks ( if done progressively would probably work )
- Others?
The compatibility problems you have trying to get data off a disks in a hardware raid make it impractical (do you have the EXACT SAME version hardware revision & firmware; without this you can't guarantee you can read it back)? Its either that or you have to pay data recovery guys to rebuild it.
Not to mention hard drive costs are still high, post thai floods. For enterprise gear we are getting most quotes ~ $300 AUD a disk, for consumer gear its ~ $130. Most servers are running at least 2 disks... that $286K worth of disks alone if your talking cheap - low capacity disks, not including labour to change the disks and test the hardware before you deploy a workload to it.
Also $286K / $9k / day ~= 32 days, so in 32 days it costs them more to keep it all running that simply replace the disks.
Not to mention they could now lease those servers to another client and make money off of them.
I just wonder if they would be in a better financial position declaring it a loss and claiming the tax break / insurance then actually doing the work?
As long as they can support the hit to the cashflow, they are likely to be able to claim the damages back from either one of the parties of the case once its decided and / or insurance.
Forgive me for for sounding like a member of Anonymous but..
So? That's the government's problem. I don't see why a private company should be in any position where they're required (at wallet or gun point) to help in an investigation at their own expense. Pull the drives, warehouse them, and let the FBI do what they have to do. They have IT to rebuild the RAIDs.
Alternatively, in a setup of this size, I imagine there'd be no end of redundancy configurations - RAID for individual disk sets, DRBD (/a SAN equivalent) across servers - turning them off would turn all that HA tech off. Meaning that, when you try to bring the system back up, the redundancy implementation might say "oh no, I've lost x peers from my set of n" and fail itself completely.
Shrug. I've no doubt explained it badly, but there are good reasons to keep them running. It's not just a case of "pop the hard drive out and use it elsewhere"; the logic associated with keeping 25 petabytes of data would also have to be restored to its current state.
Also, the government could have probably seized everything anyway as evidence. The problem with that is setting up that much rack space and network infrastructure isn't cheap.
That's Carpathia's basis for compensation. They are providing a service to the government. Seems like a no-brainer.
Regardless, why is the cost so high if the server is down? Does this $9000/day reflect the loss that Carpathia suffers from not re-allocating this storage to other customers? It would seem to me that given Megaupload's current state, it would be sufficient to leave the servers powered down and unplugged until the legal dispute is resolved... surely the cost of leaving a server idle is not $9000. I don't really know though...
I did some back of an envelope calculations... and its absolutely crazy. Tape would require over 17,000 Ultrium tapes. Now you could De-dupe... but the hardware to process and dedupe that much data.... not really an option. Not to mention the time to write that many tapes...
Something like thumpers (48 disk sun x86 boxes) would be expensive, last time I looked they were around say $30k for a large order... 160tb usable assuming 4tb disks are the thumper is split into 4 Raid 6 arrays... thats 160 thumpers... 4.8 Million
Even backblaze pods would likely be well over a Million...
This doesn't even cover hosting costs, transfer and such. Not to mention to be usable in court there are going to have to be processes in place to document compliance and validity of the copy....
All in all not a great place for Carpathia to be in.
FYI, the data is already comprehensively de-duped.
To build out web scale systems you generally use commodity gear and accept the overhead of duplication, heavy deduping requires massive IO, and there is no way i can see you can be dealing with that much data have that level of IOPS and be profitable charging what they charge.
Just - put them behind bars. I said so.
They wouldn't be held responsible for a breakin, would they?
Have any hashes been taken of the drives?
Can Carpathia sue the Federal Government for NOT seizing assets. It's the data, not hardware. Data is transferable. They want it, take it.
Can Carpathia sue? This kind of injustice just makes me boil.
I don't think the EFFs claim here is actually of any legal merit. You have no legal right to access data you sent to a third-party at at any time, why would you even think that? Theres no "lex cloud" yet.
Backing up your data on Megaupload and then not keeping a local copy is active stupidity of such vast scale that I refuse to believe it has ever happened in the real world.
To borrow a famous quote.. nobody ever went broke overestimating the intelligence of the public.
That said, having your backup service raided by LEO's toadying about for entertainment conglomerates was probably not even on the list of people's possible downtime concerns..
The purpose of having a backup is so that you can restore your data after the original is lost, because there is a good chance the original will be lost. Explicitly retaining it on your local system is not enough to keep it safe. If it was, there would be no reason to backup in the first place.
If a million people used the service for backups, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect several of them to have a drive failure each and every day.
It hasn't happened. It didn't happen. Sorry to burst your dishonest little bubble.
Do you think they were zipping up the contents of their own systems and then uploading them daily?
So either the government needs to pay up, store the drives themselves or dismiss these thousands of harddrives from the witness bench.
Also, I cant see how the EFFs claim has any legal merit. Theres no obligation for a site to enable you to access data you sent them.
Fucking exactly!! Have fucking MPAA pick up the tab.
EDIT: its going to be amazing (and will take years for sure) to see if this won't bite MPAA in the ass if the judge will rule that yes they do have to pay. Would looove to see that. This should be actually a rule of thumb -- if MPAA believes someone is infringing, court suit is entirely fine, but you guys (MPAA) will pay to keep the light on in the meanwhile.
Sure, a bunch of pissed off people will certainly be upset - but it's not the company's fault - they shouldn't have to bear this burden. I can't see how they could be sued by users for this, they didn't enter into any kind of agreement with the users, only with the customer.
Users don't care about that. Yes, some users are totally legitimate. Dropping their data because someone, somewhere thinks that the original service in general was 'evil' is not a solution that is as straight-cut as you'd like to present it.
If the hardware is left running, and not in official custody, how do any authorities know that the data isn't being tampered with?
So no, no wondering going on.
1 terabyte costs them $128.41 per year, right?
Amazon S3 would cost them roughly $444 per year, if they were using the Reduced Redundancy Storage.
The cheapest HD that I see on pcpartpicker (in terms of Price/GB) is the Western Digital Caviar Green 2.5 TB (5400 RPM) for $135.43, which is $0.054/GB. That's $54.17 per TB.
If you want a single backup, that's $108.34 per TB. Two backups (3 copies of each file), is $162.51 per TB.
So, if I'm doing this right, as long as their HDs last at least 15 months, on average, they have triple-redundancy, and the cheapest price ratio for consumer hardware. And I'm not even counting their power, network, cooling, or puny humans to maintain it all. That means their HDs, if they were made out of the cheapest parts I could find, would have to last significantly longer than 15 months, on average.
They're actually doing really good on price, if you ask me.
Or am I missing something obvious, or doing the math horribly wrong?
Christ, I am paying Dropbox charges me, at $10/MONTH for 50GB the equivalent of $6.67 PER DAY in storage costs.
For my 50GB, I am charged $.33 per day.
I think whomever downvoted that thought I was referring to the per GB cost.
it is bullshit that they have to foot such a large cost for a government investigation.