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This PR lays out a design for S3 backup using S3 Replication and the Glacier Deep Storage class. Related #524

@kabilar kabilar requested review from satra and yarikoptic November 3, 2025 19:57

The DANDI Archive is expecting a ramp-up in data volume of 6 PB of new data over each of the next five years, culminating in a total of 30PB.

Scaling up the previous analysis means that the monthly costs will be projected to rise to a total of **~$31,000/month** once all of that data is seated. While $1000/month may be a feasible ongoing cost, $30000/month is not.

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With numbers on this scale it would be useful to compare total cost to equivalent effort of just enhancing the size of the MIT Engaging partition

Also worth pointing out long-term sustainability costs since all AWS costs are dependent on time (cost per month for all time) whereas the MIT backup being on equity hardware is less so

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The numbers are not as bad now that we've corrected the data volume assumption. It may still be a good idea to compare to MIT Engaging, though we will want to take into account non-financial costs if we do that (engineering time, differences in reliability, and the ongoing costs in those terms of maintaining that backup long-term).

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How are we currently storing data on that partition? DANDI uses S3 (and, in theory, MinIO for local development or non-standard cloud deployment); what kind of storage system do the Engaging backups use?

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The output of df -hT .

Filesystem                   Type
hstor004-n1:/group/dandi/001    nfs4

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@kabilar Do you recall the quote from MIT for expanding that storage? Were there long-term costs or just a one-time deal?

We are no longer considering the use of a bucket in a different region.
@waxlamp waxlamp force-pushed the s3-backup-design-doc branch 6 times, most recently from dd89dbd to 333137a Compare November 4, 2025 15:34
We are expecting a bulk of 6PB over the next 5 years, not 30PB.
@waxlamp waxlamp force-pushed the s3-backup-design-doc branch from 333137a to da16c20 Compare November 4, 2025 15:35
@waxlamp waxlamp force-pushed the s3-backup-design-doc branch from 2efa373 to 7429734 Compare November 4, 2025 15:54
@waxlamp waxlamp force-pushed the s3-backup-design-doc branch from 7429734 to 3e74365 Compare November 4, 2025 15:55
Comment on lines 81 to 82
Scaling up the previous analysis means that the monthly costs will be projected to rise to a total of **~$6,100/month** once all of that data is seated.
The worst-case disaster recovery cost would similarly scale up to a total of **~$16000**.

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Would appreciate seeing a table of cost estimates per year assuming a 1PB increase per year (plus perhaps an extra 500 TB worst-case jump in the next year due to Kabi's latest LINC estimate), with a grand total after 5 years in the last column

waxlamp and others added 3 commits November 4, 2025 14:30
Co-authored-by: Cody Baker <[email protected]>
When the AWS docs say "GB", they mean 10^9 bytes, not 2^30.

Co-authored-by: Cody Baker <[email protected]>
waxlamp and others added 3 commits November 4, 2025 14:33
Clarify purpose of calculating the expected bucket storage cost covered
by AWS already.
$$

while the associated backup costs would represent only an additional $`\$5900 / \$126000 \approxeq 4.6\%`$ of the cost of the storage itself.
To help provide a significant level of safety to an important dataset, AWS may be willing to cover such a low marginal cost.

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Suggested change
To help provide a significant level of safety to an important dataset, AWS may be willing to cover such a low marginal cost.
To help provide a significant level of safety to an important database, it may be worth reaching out to see if AWS may be willing to cover such a low marginal cost.

Original wording sounds as if we are speaking for AWS

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Although - given their previous seeming lack of concern for applying glacier to the main archive contents (to 'save ephemeral costs'), I am guessing their perspective is less about the monetery aspect (which is being waived either way) than it is about actual additional storage at the data center (essentially doubling the size of the archive, even as it grows)

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@satra Two things relevant to this discussion

  • in your current discussion with AWS cloud architects / open data team, have they had any thoughts or suggestions on the topic of backup?
  • has MIT Engaging cluster team ever given you a quote for storage expansion (i.e., one-time, any recurrent costs, etc.)? @kabilar was unaware of any

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5 participants