Linode.com Forum

PaulC · Joined: 11 Sep 2003 Posts: 36 Location: San Jose, CA

I know that we can add additional storage to our Linodes, but at $5/Gib/Mo it's not so attractive for an off-site backup of your photo or music collection.

So... any thought to some sort of 'storage'-oriented linode package(s)? I'm thinking for 'personal backup' usage, not some sort of file download site.

Just wondering if it's something others would find useful, or it's just me. Dunno if it makes business sense, but thought I'd ask.

fs2k · Joined: 04 Feb 2004 Posts: 7

I also think this would be a good idea. The costs of some hosting providers have completely dropped through the floor. Take for example Godaddy with the $7/month plan that includes 50GB. Obviously they oversell their capacity and Linode is quite different from these providers in many ways, so I wouldn't expect something quite as cheap, but having a cheaper option at Linode would be nice. Even if it was just a server full of disks housed in the same data center that you could attach to via NFS from your linode(s) with a set quota.

I've got a Dreamhost account that I use primarily as offsite backup of my 8GB and growing personal picture collection (not even web accessible). I'm reselling excess capacity there so it more than pays for itself, but I worry that they are overselling too much since the prices and limits seem too good to be true.

PaulC · Joined: 11 Sep 2003 Posts: 36 Location: San Jose, CA

Come to think of it, it'd also be nice to have it host a local yum & apt repository, which I think has come up a few times here.

I agree with fs2k, it doesn't have to be local to the existing linodes, being able to mount it over NFS would be fine, so long as I'm not being hit twice for the network bandwidth.

I'd be probably be running a bandwidth-capped rsync in the small hours in any case, so it wouldn't need to be that fast. Just big, stable and inexpensive ;)

Paul

brocktice · Joined: 15 May 2006 Posts: 3

I would really love to have some more reasonably priced storage available. If there's enough of a market, I might even resell storage on hosts in HE and ThePlanet myself.

Is it that much of a hassle to put in some fileservers? Is there not enough of a market for it among Linode users?

maher · Joined: 08 Jul 2006 Posts: 1

Depending on your storage needs you might try Amazon's S3 service:

http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=sc_fe_l_2/103-1053166-2139008?ie=UTF8&node=16427261&no=3435361&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA

There are various apps lying around that let you use it like a hard disk...

Joseph

fs2k · Joined: 04 Feb 2004 Posts: 7

Have you found a tool other than Jungle Disk to mount S3 in Linux. I've looked and haven't been able to find one. I'd rather not go to the effort of installing X on my linode just to have jungle disk.

brocktice · Joined: 15 May 2006 Posts: 3

I gave up trying to mount S3 on my linode. It just wasn't worth it. I've actually moved the majority of my data storage to another virtual hosting service because of this (lack of reasonably priced storage) problem.

yawpper · Joined: 21 Jun 2006 Posts: 1 Location: Tampa, FL (USA)

brocktice wrote: I gave up trying to mount S3 on my linode. It just wasn't worth it. I've actually moved the majority of my data storage to another virtual hosting service because of this (lack of reasonably priced storage) problem.

Hi brocktice - I'm curious as to what storage services you've tried. I'm looking for additional storage for an upcoming project I have. Could you let us know what you're using? Anyone else?

Thanks!

brocktice · Joined: 15 May 2006 Posts: 3

Well, I don't want to come advertise for another hosting company on the Linode forums. It's not actually a 'storage' service anyway, so it's probably not exactly what you're looking for. I just have a virtual linux server with expandable storage and utility pricing, so there's not a hard limit to how much storage I have, though I pay for whatever's used. If you're looking for massive storage, this probably wouldn't be a help to you.

PaulC · Joined: 11 Sep 2003 Posts: 36 Location: San Jose, CA

TechCrunch had an interesting article on the subject a few months back. Do a google on 'TechCrunch online storage' -- Paul

edavis · Joined: 20 Jul 2004 Posts: 35

I also have a differenet VPS (that offers more storage) for backups. I plan on transitioning to Amazon S3. Duplicity has support for S3 and also there is an rsync like app called s3sync...

http://duplicity.nongnu.org/
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?messageID=37272&tstart=0#37272

web4biz · Joined: 18 Apr 2008 Posts: 1

Sorry, I hate to bring up a really old thread, but this is exactly the sort of thing I am looking for.

I currently have about 10 real world servers hosted in Michigan. 9 are actually "working" the 10th, has a big harddrive that I rsync data from each server to every night.

I'd like to start migrating these real servers to Linodes, but the lack of a cheap backup is really a sticking point.

What I need is a very low powered server on a LOCAL ip ONLY (i.e. no external bandwidth), that has at least 80, preferably 250 GiB of storage, and that costs around $25/month.

In the interim I'll look into the S3 thing, but it seems such a waste of bandwidth to have a remote service for backups, when an affordable data backup could be much closer to home :)

ArbitraryConstant · Joined: 10 Feb 2007 Posts: 54

S3 or something like it is really the best choice here.

Consider:

-The ratio of transfer included in your plan to storage included in your plan is 20:1, so backing up offsite is pretty easy.
-On site storage is of limited usefulness for backups because it's on site.

On site iSCSI services would probably be more interesting in that it has the potential to allow Linode to scale host contention ratios separately from disk contention ratios.

-We keep getting more cores/threads/memory, but the number of disk spindles remains the same. At some point this stops being a helpful improvement.
-There's some applications where it doesn't really make sense to go through the host's RAID. For example, checksumming filesystems (eg BTRFS, ZFS) need access to the underlying devices to correct errors.
-Running an I/O intensive Linode isn't good for me and isn't fair to my host-mates, and this is therefore the #1 reason I move off Linode onto real hardware on any given project. Being able to lease disk separately would negate this issue. This would definitely be pricey compared to current Linodes, but getting decent colo services on decent hardware isn't exactly cheap.

mwalling · Joined: 10 Dec 2007 Posts: 145

From http://www.linode.com/irc/logs/linode.log-2008-04-10 (snipped)

Quote: 14:50 < Xel> caker - Do you think it's plausible/possible for Linode to start offering larger storage services? I was thinking something like XRaid devices where you sell off NFS-mountable space.
14:50 < n00bwork> Xel: you can buy storage upgrades
14:50 <@caker> Xel: it's in the works already ... :)
14:50 < Xel> n00bwork: I want li9ke 60 or 80 gigs of space
14:51 < mwalling> caker: tied to the backend net?
14:51 <@caker> mwalling: yup :)
14:51 < Xel> caker - you are awesome, and I love you.

Edit: fixed newlines

edavis · Joined: 20 Jul 2004 Posts: 35

I am anxiously waiting this feature!

Currently I use Amazon S3 for backup storage and transfer data to/from using s3sync. It's quirky and on thing I really miss is the ability to store incremental linked backups ala rsync.

Amazon just announced they are going to offer the ability to mount persistant S3 volumes (each up to 1TB) to an EC2 instance. This means you can write a backup script which starts your EC2 instaance with the mounted volumes, perform rsync with glee, then stop your EC2 instance.

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/04/block-to-the-fu.html

'Storage' Linodes?