Jan 3, 17 / Aqu 03, 01 10:59 UTC
Re: Asgardia exclusive email addresses ¶
Well, you don't need it. If you had need for secure email services, you'd already of done something about that a long time ago, email is nothing new. It would however be nice to have.
As previously specifed, the largest barrier will be the storage space for the user's inboxes, which again, at current population levels, and to be using the 8TB HGST drives because they're slightly cheaper than the 10TB ones(and larger tested for reliability) we're still looking at over 350 of them to provide just a poxy 5GB of inbox per user - 2.75PB(petabyte) of storage. To assume the HD's will sit in a standard 4U blade, and to select a model you can cram 60 HD's into a blade(more common to see numbers like 24), that's then another 6 nodes that need hosting(purchase fee of 350 HD's, purchase of 6 blade chassis, purchase of 6 motherboard, potentially requirement to buy 6 sets of networking hardware, likely to require additional RAID cards per unit as one-off fee, then the monthly cost of powering and keeping connected to interwebs) - to assume each chassis costs about $200USD(likely more), each motherboard & CPU to be about $250USD, about the same for the RAID card(s) in each system(assume the front panel splits into backplanes, allowing to fit 5x SAS drives to a single cable, and the RAID has five slots, you'd need three RAID cards per 60 bay chassis, 18 total) making the cost in obtaining the HD's alone $122,500USD, and requiring about $126,700USD total just to buy the hardware - Then there's likely setup costs at the datacentre(we could do with our own one of them, too, ideally more than one) and ofc fees to keep all that powered, cool, and connected.
That is a significant startup fee. However, we have a lot of citizens. To divide that fee equally across all citizens would reduce that number to $0.23/head - which is much more manageable. This ofc doesn't cover the (likely monthly, I prefer to pay for such yearly where companies support) hosting fees. Hetzner, the folks hosting the server used for this site would be able to host them for €167,23/month each(plus €167,23 one-off setup fee) which would be the largest headache. So for about $0.50USD/head we can buy all the hardware, manage the setup fee and keep the hardware online for just over 12 months. I'm not sure if these racks would be in a secure cage(ideally potential of this should be monitored, to indicate if it's being cut into to bypass the lock and on detection of, nuke system contents. Should be able to build something that can do this for about £10/unit. Likely less).
A one-off fee is possibly something many would happily sign up for, but the regular expenditure is another thing. As the yearly running costs are less than $1/head, it's likely most would agree to this too - but it's starting to hit the realms of requiring some form of (even voluntary) taxation. Something I would be eager to avoid if possible. it also doesn't cover events like hardware failure(tho the Hitachi 8TB HGST's do have a good failure rate, but like any other drive, they do fail. Large stocks recomended). It also doesn't cover backing up this much data, which would be irresponsible not to do and require at least three times as many HD's(to follow industry standard Father, Son, Grandfather rotation pattern, and three times that to rotate thusly in a daily/weekly/monthly pattern, and three times that if you'd sensibly store backups in local firesafe, and two geographically remote firesafes) and will be a time cosuming process just swapping drives to write backups to, and putting the written ones into the firesafe.
Also about now, we are not desperate for Email services. What we are more in desperate requirement of (IMHO) is collaborational tools. That same hardware could be used to give users a 5GB storage qouta and provide us with "multiplayer software" so we can collectively work on the same part of the same project at the same time. Ofc, there's nothing to say this hardware cannot fulfill both roles sharing the 5GB per user between their email inbox and their filespace.
Reason: typo