'We can significantly reduce costs compared to the cloud,' explains why Fastmail uses its own on-premise hardware
With the development of cloud services such as AWS, there are an increasing number of cases where services are provided using the cloud rather than in-house servers. However, there are many advantages to on-premise services using in-house servers, and in some situations on-premise services can reduce costs.
Dec 22: Why we use our own hardware at Fastmail | Fastmail
https://www.fastmail.com/blog/why-we-use-our-own-hardware/
Many cloud services claim to have a 'dynamic scaling function that allows the server scale to change according to the scale of the service.' However, Fastmail can accurately grasp short-, medium-, and long-term 'usage patterns,' 'requirements,' and 'growth,' and can properly plan hardware purchases in advance. Since it does not require a scaling function, there is no need to sign up for a cloud service.
Fastmail has been running its own servers for 25 years and has extensive experience in hardware and network operations.Fastmail can also keep hardware costs low by using the same hardware for 5 to 10 years.
Fastmail had been using redundant HDDs with an Areca RAID controller until recently. However, a few years ago, they decided to migrate from HDDs to NVMe SSDs. Furthermore, they had to choose between migrating to a cloud service, replacing the HDDs in their existing system, or migrating their existing system to an NVMe SSD as a backup system.
Below is a table summarizing the prices of various cloud services as of December 2024. Some services are inexpensive, but Fastmail gave up on migrating to cloud services because it disliked the need to rebuild the system for the cloud and the fact that prices change depending on the amount of data stored.
| service | Monthly fee per 1TB | Annual price per PB |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon S3 | $21 (about 3,300 yen) | $252,000 (approx. 35 million yen) |
| Cloudflare R2 | $15 (about 2,300 yen) | $180,000 (approx. 28 million yen) |
| Wasabi | $6.99 (about 1,100 yen) | $83,880 (approximately 13 million yen) |
| Backblaze B2 | 6 dollars (about 940 yen) | $72,000 (approx. 11 million yen) |
| Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval | 4 dollars (about 630 yen) | $48,000 (approx. 7.5 million yen) |
| Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive (12 hour retrieval time) | $0.99 (about 160 yen) | $11,880 (approximately 1.9 million yen) |
In addition, HDDs were not selected because 'although they can be purchased cheaply, when a failure occurs in a large-capacity HDD, it takes about a week to rebuild' and 'I / O performance is a concern,' and in the end, a 2U server equipped with 24 61TB NVMe SSDs was purchased. The server cost about $ 190,000 (about 30 million yen), which is a very low cost compared to cloud services that require regular payments. In addition, the cost of rent, electricity, cooling, etc. is about $ 3,000 (about 470,000 yen) per year.
'Running your own hardware isn't for everyone, and there are clear trade-offs, but if you can correctly predict how your servers will scale, you can save a lot of money,' Mueller concludes.
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in Web Service, Hardware, Posted by log1o_hf