The fundamental thing here is that we need to control where the data
is stored, as we often need to colocate storage and computation.
Hence using the commercial S3 service is not very interesting.
As with VOSpace itself, the interesting thing to look at with S3 is
the access interface. The physical storage will usually be located
where we want to do the computations.
Rather than think of VOSpace as a mere storage manager, one might think of it as a Grid version of distributed shared memory. We take some storage near where the computation will take place, and put a VOSpace interface on it so that we can move data in and out asynchronously. How the storage is physically implemented can vary greatly depending upon what we are doing. Computation is done on a per-user basis, so VOSpace is always managing data on behalf of some user. The real archive/Grid storage managers are used for more permanent storage of data.
On Fri, 18 Aug 2006, John Taylor wrote:
> I'm not sure that this is necessarily the end of the world. We already pay
> for hardware, ongoing maintenance, staff time, supercomputing
> resources....etc
> If an organisation decided it was more cost-effective to outsource this to
> Amazon or anyone else, why not?
>
> Christophe.Arviset-at-esa.int wrote:
>> Roy
>>
>> Apparently, one has to pay (both for storage and for transfer!) to use
>> Amazon
>> S3:
>>
>> "Pricing
>> Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost.
>> $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used. $0.20 per GB of data transferred."
>>
>> There might be technical things to learn from them, but I'm not sure how
>> this
>> pricing scheme would fit for the VO.
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Christophe
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Quoting Roy Williams <roy-at-cacr.caltech.edu>:
>>
>>
>>> I wonder what is common and what is different between Amazon S3 and
>>> VOSpace?
>>> Roy
>>>
>>> Begin forwarded message:
>>>
>>>
>>>> From: "Alex Szalay" <szalay-at-jhu.edu>
>>>> Date: August 17, 2006 12:49:14 AM PDT
>>>> To: "'Roy Williams'" <roy-at-cacr.caltech.edu>, "'Alex Szalay'"
>>>> <szalay-at-jhu.edu>
>>>> Subject: Amazon VOStore?
>>>>
>>>> http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=sc_fe_l_2/104-7699424-9544708?
>>>> ie=UTF8&node=16427261&no=15879911&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA
>>>>
>>>> We should look at the WS specs.
>>>>
>>>> --Alex
>>>>
>>>>
>>> California Institute of Technology
>>> 626 395 3670
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------
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>>
>>
>
>
>
Received on 2006-08-18Z12:55:39