Internet Archive's Storage

I think the culture is one of 'we are doing this for all humankind' and when you get just a few smart people bought in on that level of commitment and they're trying to be lean (and also for sure underpaying themselves compared to what they might make at Big Tech) then you can get impressive results.

Wikipedia is not a pure hosting operation, it's trying to foster a worldwide community-of-practice of volunteer contributors that can be sustainable in the long term, and that does take quite a bit of spending. I have no idea why so many people keep getting this wrong.

I love libraries and museums, but I think that Internet Archive has done an incredible job.

If I didn’t have a job or responsibilities and was told that I was allowed to just be curious and have fun, I would spend a tremendous amount of time just reading, listening, watching, playing, etc. on IA.

Visiting IA is the closest feeling I can get to visiting the library when I was young. The library used to be the only place where you could just read swaths of magazines, newspapers, and books, and also check out music- for free.

Also, I love random stuff. IA has digitized tape recordings that used to play in K-Mart. While Wikipedia spends time culling history that people have submitted, IA keeps it. They understand the duty they have when you donate part of human history to them, instead of some person that didn’t care about some part of history just deleting it.

IA is not just its storage and the Wayback machine, even though those things are incredible and a massive part of its value to humanity. It’s someone that just cares.

At the end of the day, big companies just need to make profit. Do big companies care about your digitized 8-track collection you have in cloud storage? One day maybe they will take it away from you to avoid a lawsuit or to get you to rent music from them.

And your local NAS and backups? Do you think your niche archive will survive a space heater safety mechanism failure, a pipe bursting, when your house is collateral damage in a war, or your accidental death? I understand wanting to keep your own copies of things just-in-case, but if you want those things to survive, why not also host them at IA if others generally would find joy or knowledge from them?

I'm surprised no-air-conditioning datacenters aren't more common. It's a huge cost, and people love to complain about related water usage. I recall some Microsoft employees running a similar experiment years ago:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090219172931/https://blogs.msd...

I don't think it's really fair to compare IA to a real library. The Seattle public library for example spends 76% of their operating budget on employees, most of who are doing public services work. The second major expense for a real library is paying for books and materials, again IA doesn't do any of that.

It's not fair to compare an institution with a website.

> Wikipedia spends $185m per year

Only a small fraction of that is spent on actually hosting the website. The rest goes into the pockets of the owners and their friends.

You can do a lot with very little if your primary goal isn't to enrich yourself.

For a few hundred TiB, LTO-9 magnetic tapes (18 TB per cartridge) become cheaper than hard disks, despite the huge cost of the tape drive (between $4500 and $5000, but in many places greater prices are shamelessly requested, which should not be accepted; besides a tape drive you need a SAS HBA card and appropriate cables; thus you need to amortize about $5000 through the price difference between HDDs and tapes, to reach the threshold where using tapes becomes cheaper), and they become cheaper and cheaper the greater is your total amount of data, when the cost of the tape drive is amortized over more tapes. One may choose tapes for better reliability even for amounts of data that are insufficient to amortize the initial cost for tape drive + SAS HBA card + SAS cables.

This is especially true when you take into account that regardless whether you use HDDs or tapes, you should better duplicate them and preferably not keep the copies in the same place.

The difference in cost between tapes and HDDs becomes significantly greater when you take into account that data stored on HDDs must be copied on new HDDs after a few years, due to the short lifetime of HDDs. The time after which you may need to move data on new tapes is not determined by the lifetime of tapes (guaranteed to be at least 30 years) but by the obsolescence of the tape drives for a given standard, and it should be after at least 10 to 15 years.

If you keep on a SSD/HDD a database of the content of the tapes, containing the metadata of the stored files and their location on tapes, the access time to archived data is composed of whatever time you need for taking the tape from a cabinet and inserting it into the drive, plus a seeking time of around 1 minute, on average.

Once the archived data is reached, the sequential transfer speed of tapes is greater than that of HDDs.

LTO-9 cartridges have a significantly lower volume and weight than 24-TB HDDs (for storing the same amount of data), which simplifies storage and transport.

You might want to look into using cephadm to setup CEPH. Use Erasure coding as data pool for very efficient data storage and protection (8+2). From that export large RBD to be used as zpool with dedup. Scales to Petabytes and has lots of failure protection options.

Not a pro data guy but someone running something like what you're talking about for many years. These days 200TiB is "normal storage server" territory, not anything exotic. You can just do the most boring thing and it will be fine. I'm just running 1, tho. The hard parts are having it be efficient, quiet and cheap which always feels like an impossible triangle.

Yeah, resilvers will take 24h if your pool is getting full but with RAIDZ2 it's not that scary.

I'm running TrueNAS scale. I used to just use Ubuntu (more flexible!) but over many years I had a some bad upgrades where kernel & zfs stopped being friends. My rack is pretty nearby so for me, a big 4U case with 120mm front fans was high priority, it has a good noise profile if you replace with Noctuas, you get a constant "whoosh" rather than a whine etc.

Running 8+2 with 24tb drives. I used to run with 20 slots full of old ex-cloud SAS drives but it's more heat / noise / power intensive. Also, you lose flexibility if you don't have free slots. So eventually ponied up for 24tb disks. It hurt my wallet but greatly reduced noise and power.

  Case: RM43-320-RS 4U

  CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1231 v3 @ 3.40GHz (4C/8T, 22nm, 80W TDP)
  RAM: 32GB DDR3 ECC
  Motherboard: Supermicro X10SL7-F (microATX, LGA1150 socket)
    - Onboard: Dual Intel I210 1GbE (unused)
    - Onboard: LSI SAS2308 8-port SAS2 controller (6Gbps, IT mode)
    - Onboard: Intel C220 chipset 6-port SATA controller

  Storage Controllers:
    - LSI SAS2308 (onboard) → Intel RES2SV240 backplane (SFF-8087 cables)
    - Intel C220 SATA (onboard) → boot SSD

  Backplane:
    - Intel RES2SV240 24-bay 2U/3U SAS2 Expander
    - 20× 3.5" hot-swap bays (10 populated, 10 empty)
    - Connects via Mini SAS HD SFF-8643 to Mini SAS SFF-8087 Cable, 0.8M x 5

  Boot/Cache:
    - Intel 120GB SSD SSDSC2CW120A3 (boot drive, SATA)
    - Intel Optane 280GB SSDPED1D280GA (ZFS SLOG device, NVMe)

  Network:
    - Intel 82599ES dual-port 10GbE SFP+ NIC (PCIe x8 add-in card)

It's a super old box but it does fine and will max 10Gbe for sequential and do 10k write iops / 1k random read iops without problems. Not great, not terrible. You don't really need the SLOG unless you plan to run VMs or databases off it.

I personally try to run with no more than 10 slots out of 20 used. This gives a bit of flexibility for expanding, auxiliary pools, etc etc. Often you find you need twice as much storage as you're planning on directly using. For upgrades, snapshots, transfers, ad-hoc stuff etc.

Re: dedup, I would personally look to dedup at the application layer rather than in the filesystem if I possibly could? If you are running custom archiving software then it's something you'd want to handle in the scope of that. Depends on the data obviously, but it's going to be more predictable, and you understand your data the best. I don't have zfs de-dup turned on but for a 200TiB pool with 128k blocks, the zfs DDT will want like 500GiB ram. Which is NOT cheap in 2026.

I also run a 7-node ceph cluster "for funsies". I love the flexibility of it... but I don't think ceph truly makes sense until you have multiple racks or you have hard 24/7 requirements.

a couple hundred TB arranged how? and for what purpose, generally? archival, warm, hot?

for the first two, depending on throughput desired, you can do with spinning rust. you pick your exposure, single platter or not, speed or not, and interface. And no fancy raid hardware needed.

I've had decent luck with 3+1 warm and 4+1 archival. if you don't need quick seeks but want streaming data to be nice, make sure your largest file fits on a single drive, and do two parity disks for archive, a single for warm. md + lvm; ext4 fs, too. my very biased opinion based on tried everything and am out of ideas, and i am tired, and that stuff just works. I am not quick to the point but you need to split your storage up. use 18+ SMR disks, shingled magnetic recording hard drives, for larger stuff that you don't need to transfer very fast. 4k video for consumption on a 4k televsion fits here. Use faster, more reliable disks for data used a lot, &c

Hot or fast seeks & transfers is different, but i didn't get the idea that's what you were after. Hadoop ought be used for hot data, imo. People may argue that zfs of xfs or jfs or ffs is better than ext4, but are they gunna jump in and fix it for free when something goes wrong for whatever reason?

sorry, this is confusing. Unsure how to fix that. i have files on this style system that have been in continuous readable condition since the mid 1990s. There's been some bumps as i tried every [sic] other system and method.

TL;dr to scale my 1/10th size up, i personally would just get a bigger box to put the disks in, and add an additional /volumeN/ mountpoint for each additional array i added. it goes without saying that under that directory i would CIFS/NFS share subdirectories that fit that array's specifications. again, i am just tired of all of this, i'm also all socialed out so, apologies.

The EU mandates that all large data centres built/commissioned from July this year will make use of waste heat:

https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2024/germany/rechenzent...

Yes, plenty - sometimes data centers are built together with apartment or office complexes for this particular purpose. Unfortunately that already pinpoints the core limitation, due to the low-temperature of the data centers. The higher the temperature difference is, the more affective heating becomes - with air cooled systems it requires preparation to ensure that can be used for heating.

Also data centers need physical space, and often - you need heating where there is not a lot of space (cities), and for "district heating" you need higher temperatures usually.

Yandex had a data center in Finland,, not sure if it's still operational. It was heating 1500 homes with 4 MW.

https://www.euroheat.org/dhc/knowledge-hub/datacentre-suppli...

Several swimming pools do to great effect:

https://datacentremagazine.com/data-centres/excess-data-cent...

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64939558

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/free-...

I know that ~ 15 years ago we were already using datacenters in The Netherlands that were used to heat houses in a city.

I do vaguely remember that the economics of it all were not great, but it’s definitely a thing for quite a while already.

IIRC, the most recent and most technical public content we (Google) have published on Colossus are these:

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer...

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer...

Facebook's published content on Tectonic is quite good and I think it's well more recent than 2010-14.

(Current Google employee, just pointing to public content, hope that's helpful.)

All the big ones have talked about their storage systems, but have been reluctant publishing papers like they used to do, so it appears to be more of a marketing focused effort than trying to share the technical details with the world.

Every time I’ve seen that front pew in that first photo, she’s there too, holding this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9066

The Internet Archive's Infrastructure https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46613324 - 8 days ago, 124 comments

It does have these details for the current generation hardware. And if you want more, click on the link at the top:

https://hackernoon.com/the-long-now-of-the-web-inside-the-in...

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

"Don't be snarky."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And a site that's in a notorious earth-quake prone zone. I can only hope that with all the AI craze one of the bigcorp made a deal to take a copy of all data in exchange for providing it as backup if necessary

> In the unlikely, for San Francisco, event that the day is too hot, less-urgent tasks can be delayed, or some of the racks can have their clock rate reduced, disks put into sleep mode, or even be powered down. Redundancy means that the data will be available elsewhere.

So it sounds like they have data in other locations as well, hopefully.

Flaggers—on the occasion that the Internet Archive project collapses, badlibrarian’s name (indicating attitude, not acumen) in addition to their comments history checks out as a “told you so”.