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Posted

A second cabinet has come available in the Dallas datacenter. 

For 20k/yr it can house a bunch of storage and compute. with about 30k additional in up front hardware you could easily find something that can have the potential to sell for 90k+ a year. With more investment in hardware you can charge more, but it wouldn't make that much of a difference until you needed it. 

https://www.theserverstore.com/hgst-h4102-j-ultrastar-data102-storage-enclosure-102x-18tb-hdd-16-petabyte.html

Just this plus another few compute nodes would be a pretty easy way to make some money. Even if you sold redundant storage 800TB at $10 a terabyte with unlimited bandwidth is 8000 dollars a month. That's one path but there's all kinds of stuff you can do and/or host out of a rack like this and have super low costs. 

 

Posted

Is this something where your looking for a partner to defray your rack costs, or making the opportunity known that there's well-positioned rack space available?

I get that you could sell cloud storage capacity for X thousand dollars per month, but I'm just not familiar with the market economics of that space or how to find customers. It would be interesting to learn and have a peice of that action though

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Posted

Having represented SoftLayer/Rackspace, it's a definite moneymaker.  

But yeah, getting and keeping customers seems to be kind of the devil in the details.

Also, papering up the investments and the customer agreements is tricky too, or can be on a volume basis.

Posted
11 minutes ago, Captainant said:

Is this something where your looking for a partner to defray your rack costs, or making the opportunity known that there's well-positioned rack space available?

I get that you could sell cloud storage capacity for X thousand dollars per month, but I'm just not familiar with the market economics of that space or how to find customers. It would be interesting to learn and have a peice of that action though

Again, a bit of both. I can do this by myself, but it's kind of a small scale thing that could make sense to share a pool. 

This isn't a go build some huge scaled up thing, it's pick a few things you wanna host and sell it to maybe 500-800 people and just sit on it and maintain it. This isn't a high growth crazy margin play it's an its available and most people don't know how to do it play where you can turn 100k into 200k reliably YoY once it's fully subscribed. 

It could be as easy as specializing with law firms, could be a "mail us your hard drive" business and an ephemeral VM that can mount a drive and only decrypt it using a key passed by a yubikey in a client. Lots of potential angles here, but things that remain consistent: 

You can buy 1GBPS symmetric bandwidth for ~900/mo

Power and cooling are baked in and contracted long term. 

There is no restriction on what we can put in the rack from a capitalized hardware perspective and there's a lot of room with today's rack density to put in a single rack. 

Right now I still have capacity I could reclaim in my current rack and optimize it, but having a second is good for redundancy and potentially scaling. 

With hardware from last capex cycle you can easily support 5PB of storage, 10TB of DRAM and 2000+ cores of compute in a single rack without breaking the bank. (Let's call it 3.2PB of HDD and 1.8PB of SSD)

For reference in AWS the monthly bill for that alone would be in the 6 figures per month with egress fees that go even higher based on usage. When you own the bandwidth you have no ingress or egress fees you buy the pipe. 

Its a unique opportunity because I have a relationship with them and they will do this instead of rack up their own VPS capacity and its in a top facility. You can't just walk up off the street and get into something like this. 

 

 

Posted

Well it will cost 3-4k up front and 1750/mo after that just to secure it. I think that's a low enough barrier to entry to secure it before planning a bunch of spend and going down that road. 

Posted (edited)
13 minutes ago, immamac said:

Well it will cost 3-4k up front and 1750/mo after that just to secure it. I think that's a low enough barrier to entry to secure it before planning a bunch of spend and going down that road. 

So $25k gets me what in year 1? The option to spend more?

ELI5

 

Edited by Slacks
Posted
7 minutes ago, Slacks said:

So $25k gets me what in year 1? The option to spend more?

ELI5

 

Guaranteed rack space in a tier 3 Colo with contracted network power and cooling rates. Then on that there's an opportunity to monetise it for a premium depending the space is provisioned or utilized. 

This is like finding a vacancy on the drag for anything you want to put in it no-restrictions. 

The opportunity is in the location and the lack of restrictions and massive capacity you can put inside to do whatever you want with. 

Posted

I think you're misunderstanding what some folks are asking. Slacks and I don't know shit about rack storage, etc. While I get the concept of "You can do whatever you want with it" our caveman brains are asking about a potential range on ROI. That's about as far as I can go. I don't have some creative concept of what to do with the computing power in my back pocket gathering dust because I didn't have an opportunity like this until now, etc. 

  • Hook 'Em 1
Posted
11 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

While I get the concept of "You can do whatever you want with it" our caveman brains are asking about a potential range on ROI.

Same here-I’m not interested in investing in an undeveloped lot.  Sell me how you’re going to convert that to money.  

Posted

You can acquire storage for less than $1.50 per terabyte on hdd and less than $9/TB for ssd. 

Raw resale on that with remote access in a high availability, secured facility is easily $5/TB/yr on HDD and $50/TB/yr for ssd. 

Like we do nothing but make it available in chunks they have to buy/subscribe to. This is enterprise grade gear the failure rate at this scale is less than 1% and it's warrantied on our end, with redundancy they would have no disruption in service and we would be degraded for less than 72 hours in a bad scenario. 

If we put transcode GPUs in instead of storage we could do real time or near time video transcode.

You want to stay away from as a service offerings and stay as close to an MSP (managed services provider) as possible.

The upside can be 10x a year on acquisition cost with run-rate being long term secured and known. 

  • Haha 1
Posted
7 minutes ago, immamac said:

The upside can be 10x a year on acquisition cost with run-rate being long term secured and known. 

Hmmmm......

image.thumb.jpeg.e44de8137f5f07739bb3e04623860233.jpeg

  • Haha 2
Posted
51 minutes ago, immamac said:

You can acquire storage for less than $1.50 per terabyte on hdd and less than $9/TB for ssd. 

Raw resale on that with remote access in a high availability, secured facility is easily $5/TB/yr on HDD and $50/TB/yr for ssd. 

Like we do nothing but make it available in chunks they have to buy/subscribe to. This is enterprise grade gear the failure rate at this scale is less than 1% and it's warrantied on our end, with redundancy they would have no disruption in service and we would be degraded for less than 72 hours in a bad scenario. 

If we put transcode GPUs in instead of storage we could do real time or near time video transcode.

You want to stay away from as a service offerings and stay as close to an MSP (managed services provider) as possible.

The upside can be 10x a year on acquisition cost with run-rate being long term secured and known. 

That's better. So you want 90k and a year to get things up and running. So by the beginning of 2027 it would be reasonable to expect it to be generating 9-10k a month in...lets say revenue, not profit. Not sure what ongoing overhead costs. Something like that.

Company structure of....S-corp LLC with pass through distributions? That sorta thing?

Posted

I mainly want to secure the space for now. Capex can come later and be properly scoped.

That's more like 25k and a structure with people that get it. 

Posted
12 minutes ago, CooterBrown said:

The issue is that somebody has to sell the space.  Would you buy from any of our fellow chucklefucks?

 

From observation of related "services," there's plenty of customers out  there, that aren't hard to reach, but many of them are flakey as fuck and fly-by-nite.

It's like having a rental property with a low investment.  The tenants make all the difference.  A good one is great, the rest not so much.  At least they can't fuck up your Rackspace.

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