Russia soon to overtake USA as larger base of operations for SNO's?

[penfold]

Russia seems to be on a bit of a growth spurt for node location and appears it will soon overtake the US.
Latest figures for storjnet.info indicate Russian Federation 2544
and United States 2576

Germany remains number one for the moment.

[ACarneiro]

That’s very interesting but is it desirable?
Politics notwithstanding, if there is some sort of sanction tomorrow that means Storj can’t transfer data to/from Russia and they have that many nodes is it not a risk?

[nerdatwork]

@ACarneiro

if there is some sort of sanction tomorrow that means Storj can’t transfer data to/from Russia and they have that many nodes is it not a risk?

The below was discussed a while ago and I just want to link it here in case it helps.

An update about durability and data traffic in Ukraine and Russia

As you are most certainly aware, war has broken out in eastern Europe. Storj is a US company. We stand firmly with Ukraine, and also recognize that the Russian people are not responsible for the recent actions by their government. We have a blog post coming about our support for Ukraine shortly. As a US company, we must comply with any sanctions the US government imposes. The current sanctions do not require us to stop payment to Russian storage nodes. We will do our best to support storage nod…

[ACarneiro]

Yes, I remember that.
But this was over a year ago and it was “temporary pause of uploads” to Russian nodes.
If their numbers are still increasing then one can only assume that pause has now been lifted, hence my question.

[Alexey]

We raised a threshold that time and did not lower it since. So even such amount of nodes disappearing would not affect the network.
But of course it will affect customers from the sanctioned countries - they likely will lose an access.

[ACarneiro]

Thank you. I’m not surprised that there was some sort of risk mitigation in place. You guys are a lot cleverer than I am, after all

Just for my own interest, what do you mean by “raised the threshold”? More redundant chunks for the files uploaded to Russia? How do you ensure there are enough chunks outside of Russia to be able to build a file?

I understand if any of these answers are not simple to answer

[BrightSilence]

They raised the repair threshold across the board to ensure higher piece availability in general. I believe repair now kicks in somewhere around 52-54 pieces to get it back up to 80.

[ACarneiro]

Ah, that makes sense.
Thank you!

I wonder, though, if that’s still enough if suddenly 2500 nodes go offline at the same time?
I seem to remember we had a whole French subnet (I think it was) disappearing by mistake but can’t remember how many nodes that was…

[Alexey]

It has been raised to 60, see https://www.storj.io/blog/our-approach-regarding-russian-network-connectivity-uncertainty#:~:text=We%20have%20now%20further%20raised%20that%20limit%20to%2060%2C%20meaning%20that%20the%20least%20healthy%20segment%20in%20our%20network%20will%20have%20more%20than%20double%20the%20number%20of%20pieces%20it%20needs%20to%20recover.

@ACarneiro

I wonder, though, if that’s still enough if suddenly 2500 nodes go offline at the same time?

According to the statistical model - yes. There is still some impacting factor as using VPN or proxies any kind, but 80/29 model is still sustainable.

[ACarneiro]

Oh, THAT blog post I hadn’t read.
Very interesting and answers my questions.
Thank you for that, @Alexey

[penfold]

and currently Russia has just overtaken the USA…

https://storjnet.info/

[Matamonic]

Wow! That’s good. I launched my very first node this mounth. I live in the far east of Russia and my node is doing well.