Comment by hinkley

Unpowered in a warehouse is a huge latency problem.

For storage especially we now build enough redundancy into systems that we don't have to jump on every fault. That reduces the chance of human error when trying to address it, and pushing the hardware harder during recovery (resilvering, catching up in a distributed concensus system, etc).

When the entire box gets taken out of the rack due to hitting max faults, then you can piece out the machine and recycle parts that are still good.

You could in theory ship them all off to the backend of nowhere, but it seems that Glacier is all the places where AWS data centers are, so it's not that. But Glacier being durable storage, with a low expectation of data out versus data in, they could and probably are cutting the aggregate bandwidth to the bone.

How good do your power backups have to be to power a pure Glacier server room? Can you use much cheaper in-rack switches? Can you use old in-rack switches from the m5i era?

Also most of the use cases they mention involve linear reads, which has its own recipe book for optimization. Including caching just enough of each file on fast media to hide the slow lookup time for the rest of the stream.

Little's Law would absolutely kill you in any other context but we are linear write, orders of magnitude fewer reads here. You have hardware sitting around waiting for a request. "Orders of magnitude" is the space where interesting solutions can live.