After living with modest 100/100 Mbps internet service for the past year, I went back to gigabit. And I could even upgrade to 4 Gbps now. Coincidentally, the past week I experimented with adding 2.5 Gbps Ethernet to my Synology NAS. (See later on in this thread.)
Which made me think: we tended to migrate stuff to the cloud as our internet connectivity became fast enough to no longer notice a speed difference between running it locally and running the same service in some remote datacenter.
For instance, in the late 1980s / early 1990s remote login at modem speeds was mostly on par with using a command line locally. A few years later, Gmail worked just as well as a local email client. Then complex web apps. And now the time has come that raw bandwidth wise, I can access files on a server at the same speed locally as from the cloud.
So... is the NAS industry about to collapse?
On the one hand that makes sense. On the other hand, not sure if just bandwidth is good enough if round trip times are much longer. And of course privacy. But also: it makes sense to share one big CPU with a lot of other people, because CPU usage is extremely spiky. Storage, not so much: minimum and maximum over a year may not even differ by a factor 2. So if I need 8 TB then I'd need to get an 8 TB drive here at home, but the cloud storage provider would probably use half of a 16 TB drive just for me in their datacenter. Those are not favorable economies of scale. And it gets worse: spinning rust is still cheapest, but you need power to keep it spinning. Probably 24/7 in a datacenter, with data from different customers on the same drive. Here at home, the drives get to sleep when I do.
Thoughts, considerations?
Just for my own amusement I'm posting this same thread both in the networking forum and the other hardware forum to see how the reactions are going to differ.
Which made me think: we tended to migrate stuff to the cloud as our internet connectivity became fast enough to no longer notice a speed difference between running it locally and running the same service in some remote datacenter.
For instance, in the late 1980s / early 1990s remote login at modem speeds was mostly on par with using a command line locally. A few years later, Gmail worked just as well as a local email client. Then complex web apps. And now the time has come that raw bandwidth wise, I can access files on a server at the same speed locally as from the cloud.
So... is the NAS industry about to collapse?
On the one hand that makes sense. On the other hand, not sure if just bandwidth is good enough if round trip times are much longer. And of course privacy. But also: it makes sense to share one big CPU with a lot of other people, because CPU usage is extremely spiky. Storage, not so much: minimum and maximum over a year may not even differ by a factor 2. So if I need 8 TB then I'd need to get an 8 TB drive here at home, but the cloud storage provider would probably use half of a 16 TB drive just for me in their datacenter. Those are not favorable economies of scale. And it gets worse: spinning rust is still cheapest, but you need power to keep it spinning. Probably 24/7 in a datacenter, with data from different customers on the same drive. Here at home, the drives get to sleep when I do.
Thoughts, considerations?
Just for my own amusement I'm posting this same thread both in the networking forum and the other hardware forum to see how the reactions are going to differ.