We understand the context, however @Toyoo is right too. It’s never simple like a snap of fingers, you always need to change your infrastructure to support a new storage location. So we both (the Customer and Storj) have a lot of time to figure that out. And perhaps the needs of a physical move data in the truck will not be needed during the time, the sync can be finished already with partners like Storj - Cloudflyer.
My context was that when a physical move is necessary, other major cloud providers send configured and approved hardware for that to their customers, Storj doesn’t. This part is the part where the customer does not need to do anything. They don’t have to source and maybe buy suitable hardware required for that, they don’t have to think about packaging and shipping or even to search for a 3rd party datacenter on their own that might be able to upload their data securely and reliably into the cloud. This is a process that sounds to make it as easy as possible for a customer to get his data into the cloud. And I think that is a good idea if as a cloud provider you want your customers on-premise data to travel into your cloud.
And I am really not saying Storj should offer a truck as well but to create a process as simple as possible for the customers who want to move large amounts into the cloud. And as Storj is now seeking partnerships with professional real data centers, maybe those can be a part of such a service where customers could send their data physically to to have them uploaded to the Storj network.
As far as I understand, the demand is very low and even AWS is rollback this initiative.
I would agree that someone still need such a service. However, I believe that it can be solved during negotiations anyway.
Maybe for Storj because they don’t offer such a device?
A 100PB truck surely is out of proportion, who has so much data?
But this is quite recent:
Entre turned to Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage with the Veeam Backup, but realized the bigger problem was getting all of the center’s data out of its onsite storage and into the Wasabi cloud.
“We learned really quickly that bandwidth at the cultural center was very limited. The internet was too slow to take on massive data transfers to the cloud. We were trying to move all these huge audio and video files over a file server that couldn’t handle it because of how terrible the internet was,” Drake said.
“Any new client coming in where we see these conditions—large data footprint, lousy internet service—Wasabi Ball will be our go-to strategy,” Drake said.
Wasabi even has just recently expanded the availability of Wasabi Ball to the EU
Maybe Storj misses out on this type of clients?
I don’t they are missing out. First such a client has to be at the doorstep and for a client the how to get the data out/in is probably a very small deciding factor, as this is a one time thing.
I believe it doesn’t make sense to spent time on what if’s. This doensn’t bring money in. When such a client has decided to go with storj there will probably be all hands on deck to achieve the onboarding.
Even if you have a way already it may not fit for that specific client.
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I see that differently. I see this as more than “what ifs”, it is a bit of strategic thinking.
But let me explain.
First of all we see that the renowned cloud providers (Wasabi, Backblaze, Google, AWS) all of them offer such a device for offline transfer. So it is reasonable to believe there is a demand for it.
It is also reasonable to believe that there is no good reason why there isn’t a potential Storj customer who would require such a solution. In fact here in Germany even companies have these silly asymmetric lines with big downloads but small upload capacity. This might be different in other places.
But Storj has one significant and fundamental disadvantage to the other cloud providers: There is no central place or datacenter that can handle such a demand. So even if there would be a customer with let’s say 200TB of data who would be willing to buy 10 20TB disks, on his expenses and send them to Storj to have the data uploaded, he would have to learn that there is no data center, no central place that will take care of that. And additionally there is the issue of zero knowledge. How to upload the data to own buckets through a 3rd party without revealing the the data or handing over passphrases etc. This was discussed in this thread earlier and I had the impression that this might require code changes to make this possible but I am not sure about that.
So this disadvantage is fundamental. If I call Storj today and ask them where to send my 200TB disks and they tell me they have to develop a process for that first then I move my data to Wasabi or Backblaze.
Until now Storj did not have any datacenters. But this has changed. So while this does not have to be number one priority of course, what should be done and could be done is to think about if those data centers with their certifications could be the places where customers could send their disks. You could start with one data center on every continent. This would include to ask them initially if they would be at all interested and capable to be part of such a solution for customers and how such a process could look like for a customer.
Initially it could be something like: Customer sends own disks to datacenter. Datacenter puts them into a dedicated server/case. Customer gets access to this server. Data center installs all the required Storj applications and customer can access his data and upload them through this server to Storj network.
This example makes clear why I revived this thread, because Storj is now actively talking with different datacenters in the world and it would be easy to ask them additionally, if they would be interested being part in such a solution as well and start to talk to them how such an offering could look like.
Of course in the future own hardware with preconfigured software to send out to customers would be very cool as well. It seems that the Wasabi Balls are branded Netgear NAS and there was a nice manual how it would work with Archiware P5 for example (which is also a Storj partner btw.):
So yes, not number one priority of course, but an additional way to serve customers better and have an offering for customers who cannot upload their data themselves. Potentially this is additional money that comes to Storj and not to Wasabi or Backblaze.
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Doesn’t Storj have the data centres where they host the Satellites, though?
If you send the 200TB to a satellite-hosting data centre then you remove the internet upload as the bottleneck (he says, clearly oversimplifying things by not being a techie)
I think in the past the satellites were on Google Cloud. I don’t know if this still applies. I don’t think Google allows third-party hardware in their data centers. Many don’t.
But you could always ask. Maybe not where the satellites are hosted but also where the gateways are.
As a first step Storj could also try to find a data center near them and make a contract with them. With that Storj could allow customers to send disks to Storj headquarter address and then move them physically to the data center near them themselves to make the data available to the customer. This could be the initial step for offering such a solution to test if the process works, what effort is required and how much that should cost the customer.
At the end you maybe have 3 or 4 data centers per region as data center partners who handle these kind of customer requests for Storj and earn some additional money.
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Satellites are globally distributed network of servers, it is not one place, each satellite has several locations.
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Yes, but they are distributed for redundancy.
Any one satellite is capable of performing the necessary satellite “ingestion” work, if that makes sense…
This will be useless. Satellites do not transfer and do not proxy and do not store the customers data (except inline segments for pieces which size is less than a Metadata to store). Also our satellites mostly running on GCP around the globe, and you can run a pod or a VM there with uplink of course and upload that data to the nodes, but the egress traffic from GCP to nodes will be very expensive, check their pricing $$$/TB egress…
Nope. You do not need a satellite for that. You need uplink to upload data to the nodes. Satellites only the address book, payment and payouts processors, also auditors and repair workers, but they are distributed and running separately from the satellite core.
I wrote software for Records Management companies for years. Many large (and some small) corporations store copies of thejr data in offsite Vaults. These are temperature controlled secure rooms that contain row upon row of tapes, drives and other media.
At any time, the corporation can declare a disaster recovery event. The racks in the vault are removed and stacked on to tall carts. These carts are audited (Counted) and then wrapped in plastic and loaded on a truck trailer. They then take these carts to an offsite facility which contains similar hardware as the company uses internally, and all the media is then restored. There is a time limit, usually 24hrs to get it all done and operational otherwise the DR event is a failure.
There is an episode of Mr. Robot where they are at Steel Mountain, a secure vault center. That was a play on the name Iron Mountain the largest such vaulter in the USA, perhaps the world.
Most of these companies do offer online backup storage through partnerships, but online backup and restore is way too slow for the size of data they have. Yes, someone could own some ridiculous high speed Internet connection but because it is used for disaster scenarios, such speeds would likely not be available for restore during a true disaster event.
At best, the number of tapes/drives has shrunk as capacities have increased but so has the data being stored. It was not unusual to see tne vaults moving a thousand or more drives to an offsite facility during DRs.
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Of course, I knew that but completely slipped my mind.
Sorry for my rather inaccurate post 
No need to sorry, it’s a common mistake, because data centers have become so familiar…
Actually you may go to the nearest dataceneter for the client and rent a big VM or VPS with the big throughput, connect your storage disks to it and upload your data with a high parallelism (this is why this VM or VPS must be powerful) to saturate the highest possible upstream of that datacenter.
And now we see Storj is actively acquiring datacenters as partner for the commercial network.
What could be more obvious than to ask those datacenters, if the want to earn some additional money and develop a process with them that a customer could purchase to get their data onto Storj.
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Probably, if there would be a demand it could be considered too.
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Oh, yeah! Forgot about those!
Storj could pass on the 100% of that “service fee” to the data centre operators as an incentive for them to implement that procedure and cover bandwidth and power costs 
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