One of the aspects of OAM that I am trying to get my head around is storage for all of this data. I know OAM has access to free storage resources and I know about MQ's supporting a mirror, which is great, but we all know those GTIFs can really eat a lot of space and get expensive quick.
Thinking in terms of a NPO-business model I thought I would put this idea out there. My apologies if it's already been discussed. Amazon's S3 has a mode called "Requestor Pays" that with the Access Control List (ACL) of S3 bucket set to "authenticated user" allows any AWS user to get access to the contents of that S3 bucket, but pay for that access, rather than the owner of the bucket. This allows bucket owners to make data public with having to worry about paying for the cost incurred for those downloads. At $ 0.150/GB to the downloader it may seem pricey if the same data is available for free elsewhere, but it in many cases it's a lot faster a download, so you get what you pay for. Also, if you are using this data on EC2, the data transfer is free. I haven't tried it yet, but I think Google's version of S3 may have the same capability. I bring this up because from my experience with various data-centers, a large part of the potential cost of server storage is bandwidth. S3's built in metering provides a method to off-load at least part of that to those who are actually using the data. Going a step beyond this is S3 DevPay. DevPay's only difference from the above scenario is that it allows you to define an arbitrary price to any of the standard S3 prices, see http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/. What this means is that you could for example 2X the price for downloads. By doing that you can apply any end of month gain from downloads to the total S3 charge, which includes storage and upload charges. Naturally you wouldn't want to make it expensive to upload data. In fact with DevPay you can subsidize that part, by making it zero. The concept is that you could create a mechanism that would in a sense pay for itself and it might be that you would only have to charge a small percentage of the standard S3 fee make this happen. The other thought would be if looking for someone to help pay for OAM storage ( Amazon, Google? ) this kind of setup might be more palatable to them? Regards, Mark _______________________________________________ talk mailing list t...@host134.hostmonster.com http://host134.hostmonster.com/mailman/listinfo/talk_openaerialmap.org
