Hi Ceph, Disclaimer: I'm no entrepreneur, the "business model" idea that came to me this Sunday should not be taken seriously ;-)
Let say individuals can buy hardware that are "Ceph ready" (i.e. contain some variation of https://wiki.ceph.com/Clustering_a_few_NAS_into_a_Ceph_cluster) and build a cluster with a few friends and family members. The cluster we all dream off, where a broken disk at home does not mean we can't view our photos anymore, and replacing it is a matter of plugging in a new one and watch it download objects from its peer OSDs. We would have distributed and self healing storage at no extra cost but more importantly without any company involved. I'm hopeful such private storage clusters will become common place. But that leaves us with a minority of cases where a company could help. If I had no friend, I would be happy to pay a company to run a few OSDs for me and keep my data safe. And once I get enough friends the company would stop running OSDs for me and I would not need to pay it anymore. I would also subscribe to a company offer to run OSDs for me in case our cluster does not have enough. The company would not charge me anything nor add OSDs to the cluster unless it goes below a threshold (available free space / degraded objects...). I would be able to verify that and get an alert in case it intervenes when it should not, i.e. verifying if the company abuses the permissions to run OSDs to get a peek at my dataa. In other words, a company business model could be to bootstrap clusters and assist when they shrink too much. The majority of the users would not need the company's services but could seamlessly subscribe becaus e the technology is the same. I believe that's the idea behind most freemium business models. Cheers -- Loïc Dachary, Artisan Logiciel Libre
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
_______________________________________________ ceph-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ceph.com/listinfo.cgi/ceph-users-ceph.com
