Ask Slashdot: Cloud Service On a Budget?

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)?

Snail Mail and a hardrive

[duckgod]

Assuming you don't need real time analysis(doesn't look like it from problem description). Send a couple 500gb hard drives and have someone mail you the daily load of images each day with overnight shipping.

Is Amazon S3 an option?

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming 5MB of data every 5 seconds, you're dealing with ~90GB of data a day. So, looking at Amazon's pricing model (http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/), assuming you delete the data after you pull it, the storage total should be in the range of $0.095 * 90GB = $8.55/mo. Transfers into S3 are free. You'll be transfering ~2.7TB/mo out (90GB*30), at $0.120/GB, that's $324.00/mo in transfer fees.

Now, if that data isn't being accumulated 24/7 (ie. if it's only 8/5 for example), that lowers your monthly fees to the $80 range. Sure, you can shop around for someone who will charge you less for transfers (though if they're not charging at all, they may start complaining at the volume you're transfering data around), but $350/mo in fees to help keep a project that's making you money from killing your network? Would sound doable to me.

5mbytes every 3seconds is only 13.333 mbits/s.

[millisa]

we're on a business class 100mb cable connection
100mbps = 12mbyte/s (give up 15-20% for the packet overhead, 10megabytes/sec).

Distilling that summary into the data that mattered:
1.5mb image, 3mb file each under 5 megs.
and
images every 3-5 seconds

The files are 5megabytes total.
In a perfect world, they'd transfer in 0.5 seconds.

Leaving 2.5 - 4.5 seconds for the porn.

Let's assume they are the bigger size, 5megabytes, and they transfer in the more frequent number, every 3 seconds.
5MBytes/3s = 1.66667 Mbytes/s = 13.33333 mbits/s.

Why is a facility with a 100mb/s line incapable of handling this?
How did a problem where a 100mb/s line can't handle 13.3333mb/s come to a conclusion of "Fix it with the cloud?"

In any case, if you want to do a cloud setup, just about all of them will handle small 13.3mb/s constant rates and you'll pay for it more than if you figured out why your line isn't keeping up.