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Show HN: Zfs.rent

by ryanmjacobs on 11/19/20, 10:21 AM with 219 comments

• by masa331 on 11/19/20, 11:57 AM

  I have no use for this service but i definitely like your text centered websites. Right to the point, no disturbing and useless images or graphics. Thanks, that was a breath of a fresh air.

  Also this https://radious.co/philosophy.txt

  I wish such design was usable outside tech community.

• by vitiral on 11/19/20, 6:22 PM

  Recommendation: since the "rent to own model" is so built in already, also permit people to ship you THEIR drive (which they still get to own). This allows them to have a backup of existing data without the cost of upload.

• by codetrotter on 11/19/20, 11:09 AM

  This is pretty attractive to me. One thing I am wondering is, do you offer some sort of simple status panel where I can see the amount of data transfer that I have used for the month?

  Also, another thing. I might want to use this service for storing copies of important data that I download from the net. But rather than first downloading it to my own computer and then sending it to your servers, does the account on your servers have a shell so that I can run for example wget directly on the server and is it able to connect to arbitrary remote IP or only to whitelisted IP addresses?

  Also, your page lists IPv4 but not IPv6. Any word on IPv6?

• by parliament32 on 11/19/20, 10:23 PM

  >There is a limit to how many drives we can fit in a 4U rackmount server.

  Anecdote: Let me introduce you to the SuperMicro 6047R-E1R36L, a 4U chassis with 36 (!) 3.5" drive bays. How, you ask? By having bays in the front and back, of course. From experience, I can tell you this baby weighs a metric fuck-ton when loaded with drives and is an absolute abomination, but it's a wonder to behold.

  https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/6047/SSG-6047R...

• by 0x0 on 11/19/20, 12:08 PM

  Exposing drives directly with no virtualization layer - is there a risk that a malicious user might somehow flash a trojan firmware onto the drive, and then later the drive is used for a different customer?

  The classic Sprite Hard Drive mod comes to mind https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=5

• by jl6 on 11/19/20, 1:02 PM

  1. This seems very, very cheap per-TB compared to other hosted storage. Are you making any compromises here that your users should know about? How do you explain the price difference between this and, for example, a Hetzner storage box or rsync.net?

  2. Do you intend or allow these VMs to be used as web servers or any other kind of server?

• by loxias on 11/19/20, 11:27 PM

  Fantastic service! I also have thought of offering this as a side project, but I'm glad to see someone else get to it first so I don't have to. Also loving the website layout. No muss no fuss.

  One question I don't see answered: If I go the rent-to-own route, then what's the monthly price (for use of the VM and to pay the colo fees) after I've purchased the drive? $5? And is there a price cut if I want to purchase the drive outright in one payment instead of split monthly?

• by dcchambers on 11/19/20, 9:35 PM

  This is pretty neat. I am sure the comparisons to rsync.net will be made, but I see both services as unique and as covering different use cases.

  Good luck with the beta!

• by toast0 on 11/19/20, 3:59 PM

  > For rent-to-own drives, we purchase an 8-TB drive from Amazon

  Last I heard, Amazon still can't ship a hard drive properly; I would recommend a source that won't put the hard drive box in a much larger box with a garnish of air pillows, so the drive can rattle around and likely end up damaged.

• by rakoo on 11/19/20, 11:58 AM

  I might be missing something, but the whole point of zpools is to guard against disks failure; this service only gives you one drive at a time, so you are back to square one. Is it not better to provide multiple smaller disks, so that the sum goes to 8TB ?

• by mavhc on 11/19/20, 11:38 AM

  Do you have to end the key in the remote machine to send it encrypted backups? Can you merge in incremental sends without decrypting the backup on the remote machine?

• by Poiesis on 11/19/20, 5:08 PM

  Neat idea. A couple of questions:

  Does the nominal bandwidth cost of $5 for 1 TB mean it's $5 each month for a TB per month? Or is it simply "every 1TB transferred adds $5", no matter how long it took to use that much?

  For the rent to own plan, the only thing you're paying after payoff is the bandwidth fee? (Which for minimal usage might be under $5 or $5 depending on the above answer) Is that right?

• by joosters on 11/19/20, 12:05 PM

  Despite the ZFS in the service name, there doesn't seem to be any actual ties/restrictions to ZFS, as far as I can see?

  It looks like you just rent a VM from them that has a dedicated hard drive attached to it. How you choose to format that drive would seem to be an implementation detail that can be left to the user. If so, it seems odd to limit your potential customers to people who use ZFS?

• by sneak on 11/19/20, 11:07 AM

  This seems to expose a common misconception among ZFS people (and one I previously erroneously harbored) that an SLOG device is useful on a remote machine (that you are not connected to via nfs).

  It is not. It is useful for synchronous writes only, such as those done by a local database server, or remotely via NFS. If you’re just sshing in to send data, an SLOG device is a waste.

• by josteink on 11/19/20, 11:43 AM

  Dumb question: if all you plan for the users to do is send ZFS snapshots (as a backup-service or whatever), isnt 12GBs of RAM per host quite excessive?

  Wouldn’t you be able to implement this cheaper using only 4-8GBs?

• by tleb_ on 11/19/20, 12:26 PM

  Nice service. Seems a lot more trustful than a web giant.

  Would there be an equivalent for long term backup using a technology like tape storage? An alternative to S3 Glacier Deep Archive basically.

• by Tepix on 11/19/20, 4:39 PM

  What's a cheap option for a ZFS based NAS systme at home?

  QNAP is now offering ZFS based systems but they are rather pricey. Is it just BYO? How can i make one that is super power efficient?

• by londons_explore on 11/19/20, 11:08 AM

  Will you actually make money from this?

  It seems like you might have added up your costs, but not left any room to pay for your hours, unused capacity, unpaid bills, overheads, profit, etc.

• by gigatexal on 11/19/20, 11:45 AM

  I like this and hope you all succeed. I'm not in a position to rent this just yet but i have bookmarked it for the future.

• by wheybags on 11/19/20, 11:23 AM

  > Due to current export restrictions, we cannot ship to international users :/

  What restrictions are those? You even say people can use a forwarding service, if that were the case, wouldn't the forwarding service be illegal too?

• by arpinum on 11/19/20, 1:56 PM

  Is this service currently running in the closest of your house? It shares the same certificate as your personal website.

• by ed25519FUUU on 11/19/20, 6:09 PM

  The bandwidth is what kills this for me. I actually have a use-case for something like this. I'm re-partitioning my ZFS array, adding some space, and need to host all of the data for a few months while I get it all setup and tested, but the bandwidth cost at $5/TB is prohibitive.

  What's the best place to do this? I'm using google drive, but they throttle your upload quite significantly. I can see right now I'm getting about ~150kB/sec even though I have a 1GB upload speed.

• by Thorentis on 11/19/20, 11:15 AM

  So how is this better than rsync.net?

• by 3np on 11/19/20, 11:12 AM

  Love the idea, will consider it and hope it works out for you. Two things:

  * What does the 20 mbps / 1gbps capacity indicate? How is this former number derived?

  * I suspect Debian would make more sense than Ubuntu 20.04 for your target audience. At least that's my personal strong preference.

• by acd on 11/19/20, 8:54 PM

  You probably could use something like hdparm to power off unused drives and save power/watts/data center bill when they are not being used to send receive ZFS snapshots.

  hd-idle and hdparm -Y alt hdparm -S 600 /dev/sdx

• by ApolloFortyNine on 11/19/20, 9:27 PM

  $5/TB with only a guarantee of 100mbps is kind of unacceptable no? I definitely think you would have benefited from finding a cheaper datacenter, or moving your profit margins elsewhere.

  Honestly seems really interesting sans that tidbit, would be interesting to have unlimited 100mbps but gigabit at $5/TB or something like that. But $40 just to fill the drive is a bit much, and with being hard disk with only 4GB of RAM I'd think backups are what this is targeting, and not something with a lot of activity.

  Looks like a hobby project so it's no big deal, just giving my opinion.

• by tutfbhuf on 11/19/20, 3:59 PM

  Why don't you span a ceph cluster across your servers and combine all these 8 TB drives into one big pool. Then you could sell it as cloud storage with freely configurable storage sizes.

• by implying on 11/19/20, 5:02 PM

  I've been looking for an off-site cloud storage provider that takes encrypted zfs sends, so I believe I'm in the target market for this. My use case is a home storage server with a zpool of several hundred terabytes.

  However, there are some product compromises that would preclude me from using this. First, I already manage drive purchases, parity, dealing with scrubs and errors, etc. for my pool. I don't want to duplicate my effort for a second backup pool. ZFS sends are, ultimately just a long binary, and I simply want them stored, without much hassle. If I'm planning a zpool expansion, the work in using this service is now doubled, having to (non-trivially) determine the best pool geometry for my own pool, and for a backup pool made up of differently sized drives.

  I also don't understand why someone would want to give you their encryption passphrase. A service like this should just take encrypted sends, and send them back when requested. I don't want my plaintext anywhere other than my own hardware.

  That said, your main competitor suffers from all of these problems as well.

• by rubatuga on 11/19/20, 7:02 PM

  You lose a key feature of ZFS, which is scrubbing. This feature requires multiple drives in a zpool, while you only provides one. Scrubbing generally happens once a month to prevent double or triple bit flips in the same location, however you might get bit rot with your service.

• by sabujp on 11/19/20, 6:06 PM

  what are uses of this? if I want to back up linux I can now via https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664628-How-d... . This option seems more expensive per month. In the future I could even see backblaze offering something similar to this since they are a zfs shop anyways

• by O_H_E on 11/19/20, 5:53 PM

  @ryanmjacobs I think the ram page misspells "DDR4" to "DD4"

• by zmix on 11/19/20, 1:06 PM

  This is very cool. Too bad I don't have a need for it, currently.

• by daurnimator on 11/19/20, 12:02 PM

  Sounds great; would you consider offering the same for `btrfs send`?

• by unixhero on 11/20/20, 4:03 AM

  This sounds line a viable option for me. I really like the service.

• by atmosx on 11/22/20, 8:23 PM

  I wish I had the upstream to consider a similar service.

• by antihero on 11/19/20, 4:31 PM

  Looks awesome! Have sent an email :)

• by waynesonfire on 11/19/20, 6:38 PM

  excellent UI.

• by teekert on 11/19/20, 11:23 AM

  Invalid cert for me? (FireFox latest, win10)