Their competition offered a backup service, so Linode needed to match that feature to stay competitive. Pretty simple business logic.

AFAIK the competition does not offer more disk space than linode, so...

Posted in the other thread, please refer to this link

Please delete this post!

This is linode, not winode.

You necro'd this thread to say THAT?!

Just for fun I did a very brief survey of what's available at softlayer's Dallas location (this is where Dallas Linodes are right?) to see what could be offered as a 'local' (to the datacenter, anyway) storage service.

I believe that their cheapest private network machine (which I interpret to mean that it can only serve to other systems in the data center?) is $119 per month and that it's an additional $180 per month for three 2 TB drives in it, for a total of about $300 per month.

As a very raw cost, this is $0.05 per gigabyte per month, but assumes:

- That all 6 TB of drive space is entirely dedicated to storage
- That there is no loss of storage space due to redundant RAID configurations that protect against drive failure

To fudge some numbers, how about only 1/2 of the drive space being available? Then the cost per gigabyte is $0.10 per month. Now maybe someone wants to make a profit off of the storage service, so double the cost again. Now it's $0.20 per month.

Perhaps some enterprising individual would like to start a company providing networked storage that is local to the data center to Linode customers? If customers are charged $0.50 per gigabyte per month, a profit of $0.25 per month per GB seems possible. On a 6 TB server that is $1500 per month profit.

I wonder how many Linode customers would be interested in $0.50 per month networked storage? And I wonder what kind of performance could be expected with a storage machine local in the data center?

You don't need a private network server, since it'd going to have to go public to get to Linode's network inside the DC anyhow.

SoftLayer's CloudLayer storage pricing is cheaper than what you're proposing, they'll sell you storage in the DC as low as $0.15 per gigabyte. Here's the equivalent pay-as-you-go and built-in-bandwidth packages for 100GB of storage:

Storage: 100GB
Base price: $19/mth
Inbound: Unlimited
Outbound: 1GB included, $0.10/GB extra

Storage: 100GB
Base price: $38/mth
Inbound: Unlimited
Outbound: 500GB included, $0.10/GB extra

I don't think you can use it for POSIX-style filesystems, though. Their StorageLayer (which is the back-end for CloudLayer) service definitely can be, though, and you can access that through a SoftLayer VPS. The cheapest such one is $79/mth, and SAN storage is $0.10 per gig...

What would be interesting would be if you could talk SoftLayer into letting your linode talk right to the SAN...

I guess I didn't understand what 'private network server' meant then, I assumed that it meant that you don't get a public IP, and thus get no public bandwidth allotment, but that your server has an IP that is routable within the data center and thus its services can be used by other systems that you rent within the data center; and then I further assumed that Linodes would have such access, being in the same data center. But I guess this is wrong?



So what I'm thinking of is a networked storage device to be treated either as a networked filesystem or as a network block device by Linodes. The above configurations you mentioned don't do that, although maybe the direct-to-SAN option would, but SoftLayer doesn't sell that as far as I can tell.

Everything outside of Linode's network is the outside world, as far as the network is concerned -- they don't have access to any other back-end networks that might exist elsewhere in the building.

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Once you buy a $79 CloudLayer VPS, you can add as much SAN storage as you want, and then the CloudLayer VPS could be your access point that all your Linodes connect to. How you share it from the CloudLayer box would be up to you. You could treat it as a networked filesystem (SMB, NFS), or as a block device (iSCSI). Although if you were to use iSCSI, it'd actually be two layers of iSCSI (or rather, two distinct iSCSI hops with the CloudLayer box in the middle).

Alternatively, it's possible that you could just route between SoftLayer's SAN and your linode using a CloudLayer VPS to bounce the traffic. That's not necessarily conducive to selling it as a service, since you could probably only do that to one Linode, but even at 50GB it'd be cheaper than Linode extra storage ($2/GB).

The downside to all this is you're going to be double-billed for bandwidth, both on Linode and SoftLayer's side.