Show HN: Zfs.rent (opens in new tab)

I like the text centered layout too, but in general I have a problem with sites not having a "legal notice", giving me a quick overview who is behind the site and service. In Germany a "legal notice" is enforced by law and this is a good thing.

"Aesthetics are second-class to usability"

but plain text is better than 99% website's aesthetics, most people just have no idea how to design anything. I think plain text belongs to "outsider art", where a lot of people practicing don't even notice how visually appealing it is (when done right).

Why do you believe anyone outside tech community would value a text only 90's vibe websites?

A very backend developers philosophy of front end, not sure I agree though it sounds like generally good advice

I find this site much, much less useful than your average image-heavy marketing website.

It completely fails to explain, in simple, general terms, what the hell it is or why I should care.

The first, most prominent item on the page is some numbers that mean nothing to me.

The second item says this is beta, which I don't care about since I don't know what this is.

The third items claims to be the "purpose", which is exactly what I want to know, but the one and only piece of information is a weird command line that, again, means nothing to me.

The fourth item tries to explain what this is, but just goes into a lot of detail when I am still wondering what this is for.

I still don't really know.

For example something like that:

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/04/03/silent-fanless-fre...

It will provide you a ZFS mirror of two 5 TB 2.5 drives.

I repaste the table from the article for convenience.

    PRICE  TIME       SERVICE
     $447  5 YEAR(S)  Self Build NAS
     $567  5 YEAR(S)  Self Build NAS (assuming one of the drives failed)
    $1500  5 YEAR(S)  Amazon Drive
    $1550  5 YEAR(S)  Google One
    $1200  5 YEAR(S)  Amazon S3 Glacier Storage
    $2250  5 YEAR(S)  Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

I have a Helios64 NAS that I'm running a raidz pool of 5 3tb drives on with no issues. Full kit of board and enclosure was $295.

Overall I've been very happy with it. The only negative from a ZFS perspective is it doesn't have enough ram to support deduplication but that's not a big issue for my use case and otherwise I've been very happy with it.

https://kobol.io/

Since you mention QNAP, an alternative if you're mostly just looking for a NAS then an old computer with TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS) is a nice alternative.

You don't need more than about 4GB of RAM, however ZFS is quite good at using it for cache so the more the better.

Anyway, whatever you do, don't enable deduplication. You can't simply turn it off and it imposes sever limitations.

I highly recommend the BYO route, especially if you have part of a suitable machine already lying around. Just about any x86 based system that can take 16GB+ of memory will be a good candidate. ECC is recommended but many people, myself included, have run many stable years without ECC. Load the latest Ubuntu up and give this [1] ars how-to article a read (keeping in mind it is several years old now). Power efficiency will mostly hinge on the cpu and how many hard drives you keep spinning. To scale past the the number of SATA ports you have on a motherboard, add an LSI HBA card like the 9300-8E or 9207-8E.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/ars-w...

I went and picked up an old dual-CPU Mac Pro 4.1 - four disk slots with WD Red 4TB and one SSD in the 2nd ODD slot for Debian.

It is extremely silent after cleaning the fans and replacing the aged GPU with a silent one but not power efficient, that's granted. But at least it's having actual processing power and can sustain ~120MB/s write unlike its predecessor (Lenovo ix4-300d) that could barely be bothered to do 10 MB/s...

cheap hardware with fresh disks + Alpine Linus is my personal preference. Even with full LUKS disk encryption

https://blog.haschek.at/2020/the-perfect-file-server.html

rsync.net is expensive because they are more of a "cold-storage be-all and end-all" data sink. Their backend is AWS, and so the cost reflects that. I might be wrong on this, but I think they use Glacier.

Here, we are pretty much providing a datacenter hookup for your hard-drive. If that hard-drive fails, we can ship it to you for recovery, but that's on you.

The idea for this site is that most people with ZFS pools already have a mirror/RAIDZ setup at home, and would enjoy the peace of mind if they had one-extra data-sink to send their snapshots.

Therefore, true data-loss will occur if:

  * Their house burns down

  * AND the remote zfs.rent hard drive fails

...all at the same time.

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Personally, I live about 20 minutes aways from my parents' house. I have two separate ZPools (one for my place, one for theirs). I sync the two every time I visit.

I wanted an extra cloud machine to sync to once a week or so -- you know, in case Northern California fires really get out-of-hand :/

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EDIT: I went to rsync.net just to double-check. It looks like they are running their own infrastructure now.

https://www.rsync.net/products/locations.html

Maybe my memory is going haywire, but I swear I remembered reading that they used AWS as their backend.

> a Hetzner storage box

I think the better comparison would be an SX-line dedicated server from Hetzner [0] and this server isn't too far off that.

This service: $10 for 8TB, or $1.25/TB.

Hetzner SX62: 64€ for 40TB, or €1.6/TB ($1.9 USD).

> rsync.net

Rsync.net is ridiculously overpriced. Even at their cheapest tier, 1TBmonth costs $15, for which you can buy 7.9TB at Hetzner. Even if you created 3 redundant copies at Hetzner, you'd be paying only half what rsync.net would charge.

[0]: https://www.hetzner.com/de/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-sx?co...

They charge $5/TB for traffic over initial 1 TB free, and Hetzner charges $1/TB over initial 20TB free, so doesn't make sense to use them as a web server. BTW, Hetzner also has storage servers - 40TB for 64 euro, which is only slightly more expensive per TB.

>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?

The compromises seem to be spelled out in the description in a fairly straight forward manner. There isn't flexibility beyond 8TB storage blocks, and it defaults to just one which in my opinion is fairly useless for ZFS, you lose some of the real self-healing and safety advantages (yeah you can have copies within a single drive, but that halves/thirds your space just like a mirror and it'll be slower and with less redundancy than just two half sized drives in a mirror). So basically double or more the pricing there. The data transfer limits and pricing on that is also somewhat higher, so not for high churn. I'm assuming that "1 TB included" is per month, so for offsite replication essentially there'd be a "loading fee" per drive, then bandwidth is covered going forward if churn is less than 1 TB/month. And even in the best case they don't claim you'd be able to saturate even 1 Gbps, so loading will take a while. At 100 Mbps bringing an 8 TB pool to ~3/4 would take around 6 days. There is no SLA, appears to be no autobackups or anything like that.

The pricing could use some more clarity too. Under rent-to-own for example, it's not clear what the pricing is after you have covered the drive(s). Not clear what payments they take and through what service. I wouldn't personally put keys there either, but since ZFS supports raw send/receive there is less need to trust the far side unless your metadata is sensitive as well.

So basically it's ultra bare bones, for cheap.

Which isn't a bad thing to have in the mix. I'm happy to see more space for people to experiment with very minimal focused efforts that lean more heavily on ZFS itself to try to economize vs traditional models. Personally, right now this is still a bit farther on the rough side of the line then I'd feel comfortable with (I'd want to at least have a vague idea of who they were and where exactly the data center in question is). But the basic idea is a neat one, amortizing something someone wanted to do anyway.

From the description it seems there is no backup or redundancy.

My thinking is the aim of this is a cheap way to store large volumes of data (eg from a ZFS NAS). Multiple disks would offer redundancy but would be more expensive. Since this is a backup service, the outcome of having that drive fail is less severe (ie you can put a new disk in and repopulate the backup) than if that was your primary storage device. For home users this might be an acceptable risk given there isn't much else out there in the same cost point ($/TB) and which also support ZFS.

Businesses and enterprise users would likely prefer an organisation with a proven track record (eg rsync.net) anyway -- even data replication aside.

I guess the idea is that you rent multiple disks at once. Two disks of 8 TB each let you mirror the data redundantly for example.

Usually yes, but i wouldn't mind a single 8TB drive just as a backup location. All my data is already on a nice redundant system at home, but having just 1 extra replica somewhere else would be really good.

Personally I'd use this as a backup target that I could stream ZFS snapshots to.

Zpools with the correct level of redundancy protects against bit rot, occasional hardrive failure and the like(as you correctly point out), but not against total machine loss.

Its probably helpful to think of it as an offsite backup more than anything else.

It says on the page

> Rent out multiple drives if you wish to create a RAIDZ or Mirror ZPool.

Seems to be a lot cheaper for one.

Unless I'm missing something rsync.net is minimum $25/month for 1TB, and this is ~$15/month for 8TB.

The biggest difference that I can see is that this is more like a colo, where you own (or rent) your own equipment (in this case hard drives) to be stored in their facility, where you'll get a (rather generous IMO) VPS that can access your data.

They seem to offer different use cases - I'm not sure you can say one is better than the other.

rsync.net is more expensive, but has included snapshots and better fault tolerance/data retention policies. It's also been around for nearly 20 years, they own their own datacenters, and have a proven track record with thousands of users.

This is cheaper (maybe, depending on your bandwidth usage) and gives you better "ownership" of the hardware, but because it is hardware its just as likely to fail or corrupt data as a hard drive sitting under your desk. This service is also in beta with just a handful of users.

Both companies seem to have really good policies and to be unix user-friendly.

Perhaps I'm wrong but this seems to give you full access to a VM whereas with rsync.net you only have very restricted access mostly to support storage and little else.

Probably faster, more efficient (less bandwidth consumed) sync because of block level replication rather than file-level.

Hi! We are currently working on a _simple_ account management portal backed by our PostgreSQL instance. This will print out a monthly table with your bandwidth usage/quota and provide a Web Interface + API to purchase more bandwidth, add drives, etc. Our design is API first, with a simple wrapper around the API as our Web UI. They both will be well-documented and functionally the same.

This Hacker News soft launch was mainly to see if we could generate enough users to purchase a second and third server and scale-out. And by the looks of it, we can!

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As for downloading large files directly to the instance, I'm with you 100%. That's exactly one one of the use cases. (I'm looking at you: massive linux ISOs and +30 GB Xilinx toolchains.) Personally, I like to download them first to a remote machine (takes about 5-10 minutes for 30 GB) and slowly rsync them to my local dev machine with `rsync --partial --bwlimit=10M`.

Think of this service as $5/month DigitalOcean VPS, but it happens to have a hefty native storage unit passed through.

You can SSH into it and do whatever you want with it. In fact, you don't even have to run ZFS. You could run any filesystem -- EXT4, XFS, BTRFS, etc. Compute-wise, it's not going to be anything groundbreaking -- just a 16-core Ryzen 3700 with a couple of cores passed through to you. Ryzen CPUs support ECC and are still priced as consumer-CPUs which is fantastic.

The nice thing about KVM is that even if you don't explicity allocate CPU resources, if the guest machine needs to burst compute, it will "Steal time" from the hypervisor as long as there is extra headroom. This isn't the case with RAM. (For RAM, whatever you set, that is the hard maximum limit.)

Also, I can enable IPv6. I think we get a block of /64 of IPv6 for every IPv4 address. Most people are worried about getting their hands on a dedicated IPv4 address (~$1/month @ most co-locations) so that's what I mentioned.

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

You could use TunnelBroker.net on top to get IPv6 if they don’t offer it and your use case requires it.

I'd imagine people that are paranoid about these things wouldn't be sending their unencrypted data to third parties anyway. So there's that.

I'm a little skeptical to the claim that passthrough is so much faster than virtio-scsi or something similar. I'd imagine that the disk controllers and network would be the bottleneck. And as an added bonus you prevent people from doing shenanigans on disk firmware. We're talking about plate spinners here, latency isn't really what they're known for.

Not an answer, but any dedicated server provider would have the same issue.

I think that’s why they have encryption and also you can own your own drive.

When you are no longer a customer, they mail the drive to you.

Current OpenZFS supports zfs send -w:

"-w, -raw

For encrypted datasets, send data exactly as it exists on disk. This allows backups to be taken even if encryption keys are not currently loaded. The backup may then be received on an untrusted machine since that machine will not have the encryption keys to read the protected data or alter it without being detected. Upon being received, the dataset will have the same encryption keys as it did on the send side, although the keylocation property will be defaulted to prompt if not otherwise provided. For unencrypted datasets, this flag will be equivalent to -Lec Note that if you do not use this flag for sending encrypted datasets, data will be sent unencrypted and may be re-encrypted with a different encryption key on the receiving system, which will disable the ability to do a raw send to that system for incrementals."

Source: https://zfsonlinux.org/manpages/0.8.5/man8/zfs.8.html

Yup. I believe ZFS supports sending incremental snapshots without having the decryption key.

However, it become a pain-in-the-ass if you have recursive snapshots where only some of the datasets are encrypted. I think... in order to accomplish this, you need to send separate batches of snapshots... one for each set of encrypted vs. decrypted.

E.g.

  /zpool/tmp          # not encrypted
  /zpool/home/someone # not encrypted
  /zpool/home/someone/thunderbird # encrypted

  $ zfs snapshot -r /zpool zpool@today

  # this will probably bork
  $ zfs send -v -w -R -I zpool@yesterday zpool@today | ...

  # but this will work
  $ zfs send -v -R -I zpool/tmp@yeserday zpool/tmp@today | ...
  $ zfs send -v -R -I zpool/home/someone@yeserday zpool/home/someone@today | ...
  $ zfs send -v -w -R -I zpool/home/someone/thunderbird@yeserday zpool/home/someone/thunderbird@today | ...

NOTE: I haven't fully explored this. But from experience, loading the key on the remote solves a lot of problems. The most import feature of encryption for us is encryption-at-rest. I just want to pull the AC plug and ensure that the data is protected.

I guess this is done through the traffic costs? 1TB included, each additional $5/TB which is probably higher than the "real" cost of the traffic.

That’s my concern. I would 100% sign up at this price, but I’m doing the math in my head:

They offer 4GB VMs; Assuming they’re oversold and using a good backblaze-pod like design, they can fit ~32 drives per U. 32 * $5/mo is $160; Assuming they’re paying $50/U and the customer’s guaranteed bandwidth is included in their colo cost, that gives them $110 gross margin. Cost of drives is retail - If they have a better supplier that’s a few $ more, but not a lot. The hardware to run that is another real cost. I doubt it costs less than $2000/U to outfit the hardware; It doesn’t have to be beefy but SATA slots add up.

That gives a payoff time of ~18 months. Doable, but not amazing. At a scale of a few dozen racks, this could be a lifestyle business, but it’s sorta marginally so. Assuming a hardware lifetime of 3 years, you start breaking even halfway in. Lifetime margin is about the cost of the hardware - $2000/u. If this is a single man show, about 2 racks (= ~3000 customers) gives a reasonable “salary”, but the upfront costs are high.

Ubuntu comes with working ZFS support OOB with no need to fiddle around. You don’t even need DKMS.

My guess is implementing with Debian would be more effort.

Is it "currently in use Vs capacity"?

I laugh at your 36 drives and present to you the Backblaze Pod: 60 drives! Look upon it and weep! https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-serv...

The Supermicro DE1CR60 fits 60 3.5" drives in 4U with top loading.

I'd guess that at this stage, it's probably not impossible, but may simply not be worth the paperwork and admin of ensuring compliance. Using a forwarding service shifts some of the liability.

There are a lot of laws about sending cross border hardware and data.

By saying US addresses only, they can say they had no knowledge of which country it was going to.

I suppose the forwarding service might be different because it's you sending it to yourself; the US company only sent it to your US address. i.e. the restriction might be on US companies rather than 'exports from the US'. Just speculating.

Find a niche market, and make it your own

That's overhead

To each his own.

And in between those two, I'd be interested in the rent-to-own minus the rent: just let me pay for the drive up-front.

Yep. Great advice.

You mean "sshing in to 'zfs send' data" won't need a SLOG? That's a good point.

This zfs.rent server lets you run local programs too on it, so SLOG would help there.

Only thing I could think of was maybe dedup. However, dedup chews up _lots_ of ram. Gobs of it. To be honest, 12gb doesn't seem like enough to run dedup on something like a 6TB pool (just an example) anyway. I recall reading rough estimates of 4x (or even 5x depending) ram for dedup sizing guidelines at one time.

> 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.

it can, see raw sends: e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148494

ZFS encrypted datasets allow for raw sends, the target server never needs the decryption key.

To securely restore you would need to be able to ZFS send back to yourself first.

You can scrub but not repair, ZFS will tell you of corruption but not be able to repair.

You can also set copies blocks/data (copies=2) which stores two copies on one drive, allowing you to repair. Doesn't cover you for drive failures but can for bitflips. And you'd get half the storage.

> Rent out multiple drives if you wish to create a RAIDZ or Mirror ZPool.

I entered 8TB initial load/1TB monthly transfer into BackBlaze's "calculator" for "cloud storage" (is this the same as their personal service? It's the only pricing info I could find even after three min of looking..) and it quoted me $735/year.

Maybe I'm missing something.

Looks alright to me (certificate by Let's Encrypt for the right domain and a valid validity range).

Firefox 83, Fedora 32 works just fine.

You're going to be shocked when you discover how little packaging or care goes in to distributing hard drives from the manufacturer to the retailer.

Yeah, I guess the word "nominal" is a little awkward in this case.

We meant it in the sense that most users... will not exceed 1 TB/month data movement, therefore the _nominal_ or _expected_ charge would be $5. Take myself for example, once my data was in the system, I maybe move 30 GB a month and that's it.

(Although we're dealing with ZFS datahoarders here... so some assumptions may need to be discarded ...)

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> 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?

Yup. That's correct. You're just paying for a slot in the machine + bandwidth. If you need extra bandwidth, it's $5/TB.

The marketing is key here. You guide potential customers to a solution for their problem which is perfectly normal even if the solution could be used in a different way too

Hahaha no I have several sites running with that Let's Encrypt cert. I'm working on separating them out, but until I get my DNS Let's Encrypt process automated, I'm just extending the cert via certbot.sh :/

I left a comment recommending that they allow people to send _them_ 8TB drives (which the customer then already owns), which would invalidate the initial upload cost :D

IIUC this is just a drive right?