Ask Slashdot: Cloud Service On a Budget? 121
First time accepted submitter MadC0der writes "We just signed a project with a very large company. We are a computer vision based company and our project gathers images from a facility from PA. Our company is located in TN. The company we're gather images from is on a very high speed fiber optic network. However, being a small company of 11 developers, and 1 systems engineer, we're on a business class 100mb cable connection which works well for us but not in this situation. The information gathered from the client in PA is s 1½mb .bmp image, along with a 3mb Depth map file, making each snapshot a little under 5 megs. This may sound small, but images are taken every 3-5 seconds. This can lead to a very large amount of data captured and transferred each day. Our facility is incapable of handling such large transfers without effecting internal network performance. We've come to the conclusion that a cloud service would be the best solution for our problem. We're now thinking the customer's workstation will sync the data with the cloud, and we can automate pulling the data during off hours so we won't encounter congestion for analysis. Can anyone help suggest a stable, fairly price cloud solution that will sync large amounts for offsite data for retrieval at our convenience (nightly Rsync script should handle this process)?
Re:BYOS (Score:3, Funny)
Is the data being generated 24/7? If so, that's 432 GB/day, pretty much exactly 12 hours worth of your 100 Mbps bandwidth. So some spooling is needed, but why in the cloud? The main goal would seem to be avoiding paying twice to move the data, so you'd want to avoid using through a 3rd party if at all possible.
1. The simplest solution would appear to be to put a laptop with a 500+ GB HD at their facility. A laptop because it essentially has a built-in UPS, and the CPU can sleep much of the time.
2. Develop a relationship with whoever provides their bandwidth. Find the nearest peering point. Put a laptop there.
3. Get the NSA as a client, do some sysadmin work for them. Your data will be RIGHT THERE!
Re:BYOS (Score:5, Funny)
[I would use SSDs in a metal padded case knowing Fedex].
Fedex is like UDP, an unreliable delivery service. In fact there is only one fault of UDP it does not duplicate. Things can arrive broken, out of order, delayed, or not at all but I have never heard of Fedex delivering multiple copies!
Re:BYOS (Score:4, Funny)
I have. Sometimes Amazon messes up. This is how I have a copy of XCOM. :)