Re: [Duplicity-talk] S3 getting started

[rsync.net]

On Wed, 20 Jun 2007, mike wrote:

> On 6/20/07, Duane Winner <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > Now the tough part -- deciding which one to use for our enterprise
> > backups. I'm leaning heavily towards rsync.net, well, just because I
> > feel like it's my civic duty to support the FreeBSD guys the way they
> > seem to support FreeBSD.
> > But of course it all comes down to political and business decisions here
> > which I may or may not have any control over. Also, next on the agenda
> > is looking into Amazon Web Services EC2 to see if it is a viable
> > solution to virtualize our web and database servers. This should be fun.
> > So depending on where that goes, that may influence the decision of who
> > to use for backup storage.
>
> there is a cost difference as well.
>
> rsync is $1.60/gb/month for storage, no data xfer cost
>
> amazon is $.15/gb/month for storage, tiered pricing for data xfer
> (between $.10-.18 per gig)
>
> depending on the types of transfers and direction and such that could
> probably work out to be quite a cost difference.
>
> to me rsync.net would probably be faster and have more agile support.
> however, not to bash on rsync.net, but is the parent company on the
> fortune 500, or it's name known worldwide? oh - also rsync.net is
> built on open standards (ssh, webdav, etc.) so virtually any product
> that supports those could be used.


Just to address the size/stability issue ... although rsync.net has only
been doing business on its own for ~2 years, it is a spin-off of
JohnCompanies co-location, which is one of the largest co-location ISPs in
North America (second behind Rackspace ?).

We have been in this business for 7+ years and have relationships with
bandwidth providers, suppliers and facilities that go back even further
than that.

With over 1000 customers in 50+ countries around the world, we are large,
and getting larger every day.  As large as we get, however, it will always
be KISS all the way - normal files on normal filesystems with standard
access methods.  Nothing more, nothing less.


> amazon has the power of the amazon brand, the huge computing and
> storage infrastructure they keep building on for all these services
> and probably will run cheaper. it might be an easier sell just due to
> the name being recognized by upper management. s3 is a pseudo
> proprietary protocol (well, interchange) that does require application
> awareness (or a transparent transit backend) ...


I wonder how many engineers at Amazon are active participants on
open-source mailing lists ... :)

The bottom line is, there are indeed pros and cons to both, and there is a
place for s3 just like there is a place for rsync.net.  We look forward to
supporting Kenneth, duplicity, and many other forms of development far
into the future, and hope to count many of you as customers.

John Kozubik
rsync.net, Inc.