With so much computer activity at DAZ, I would like to learn about DAZ computer systems.
Bendinggrass
Posts: 1,373
I was thinking recently about the computer activity at DAZ.
I mean, in a real world, practical sense, there is a lot of interaction at this site, with the forums, personal accounts, galleries, shop browsing, purchases, and downloads.
I am curious as to what kind of equipment, bandwith, energy consumption, and so on, is required to handle all this traffic. Eg., if I download one store item while other people are doing the exact same, how it that done unless there are multiple locations for that store item.
Obviously, I know nothing about this kind of thing, but it struck me as being a complex and amazing system.
Any information or discussion on this would be appreciated.
Randy
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Comments
I've always assumed it was all accomplished by an intricate system of pulleys and strings manipulated by highly trained hamsters or gerbils... I could be wrong, people keep saying there are lots of IT people and legions of techs running everything behind the scenes, but I keep getting the 508 Error notification "Your request can not be completed because the hamster carrying the data packet was crushed in some gears"... I guess that's probably technical jargon, but it does seem rather sad.
And kinda funny too.
Not if you are a hamster though.
And pity the poor "bugs."
what folks tend to forget about large IT systems is the back end (power/cooling/backup power and cooling/etc.) that is needed to support the IT infrastructure. Often the cost of the "backroom" is more than that of the IT equipment. One of my more interesting jobs in IT was being the liason between the purely IT management and the section that looked after the "backroom" at our datacentre in the mainframe days..
I'd be surprised if they'd share such info. Just in case of hacking, or some other form of sabotage.
(And, yes, I am paranoid).
Yes, know what you mean.
I am asking in a general way..... I think hackers would be way beyone any kind of knowledge shared here.
You know, cpus used, their favourite kind, size of HDD, size of computers used. As an example, my friend has a business storing medical data for a number of MDs, and has a large set of HDDs and back-ups ready. It was always fun to pick his brains on how things were done....
Just curious.....
Sharing their general hardware infrastructure setup is not enough for any hacker to take advantage of. There isnt a huge amount of variation in the general principles involved with providing digital content to a consumer base, so no doubt their setup is basically the same or very similar to thousands of other businesses around the world.
Going into detail about the software side of their infrastructure, that is a different story.
I would think the most cost effective way to host an online store, user forum, and download service would be to rent those server services from someone like godaddy or Amazon. Datacenters cost a small fortune to build and another small fortune to maintain and staff.I really doubt Daz would make the financial investment in server hardware when renting it is cheaper and the rental service handles all the maintenance, staffing, and day to day IT stuff that makes an online presence possible.
The bulk of it is probably happening on Amazon AWS. Their offices probably have only a limited amount of localized data.
..Joe
So if we do a nslookup on...
www.daz3d.com
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: www.daz3d.com
Addresses: 104.18.221.105
104.18.222.105
And then if we do a WHOIS on the ip addresses
NetRange: 104.16.0.0 - 104.31.255.255
CIDR: 104.16.0.0/12
NetName: CLOUDFLARENET
NetHandle: NET-104-16-0-0-1
Parent: NET104 (NET-104-0-0-0-0)
NetType: Direct Assignment
OriginAS: AS13335
Organization: Cloudflare, Inc. (CLOUD14)
We find what ever they are running is hidden behind Cloudflare, could be AWS or could be a Raspberry Pi under somebodys desk...
Mmm looking at the headers they are using a GoDaddy secure certificate so it might be hosted with them as well...
S.
Yea 100% self-hosted solutions isn't really a thing any more. It's all distributed, load-balanced servers (like AWS) , localised caching (eg Cloudfare) and all sorts of fancy storage/db solutions.
I don't know much about it either tbh, but yea, it's pretty sweet.
Jack, from another perspective, the huge amount of data in my DAZ content is forcing me to make a new file on a different HD. So, the amount of HD space they need must be stunning, just to store all their possible downloads.
If you think DAZ needs for storage space is big, then consider how much a video streaming service like netflix needs. As users we only keep a small cache locally, they need to keep every movie / show; AND they need speed(and lower cost) in distribution so basically they need to implement HUGE storage caches in most popular ISPs to guarantee the best speeds for thousands of users viewing at up to 4K.
Back to DAZ, public cloud infrastructure helps a lot in storing and distibuting your content. I don't know if DAZ do this, but as someone with IT Infraestructure experience i know one of the most popular scenarios for this kind of content is storing in Object Storage (like amazon S3 or Azure Blob), then if you need added speed in distrbution you add a layer CDN over that. And the biggest cost is not actually in storing, is in the bandwith. Storing a 1GB item cost less than 3 cents (u$s) per month in most cloud providers; but each download could cost from 2 to 10 cents (depending the provider and the volume).
Depends on the size of your operation. For smaller enterprises, absolutely hosted services are cheaper.
Once your organization is large enough, it's cheaper not to have a middleman.
While I'm curious, I would be shocked if someone at Daz told us what they use. I would expect them to keep it confidential.
Given the page-serving errors these days, and all the problems we had downloading our paid purchases there for a while, I'm sure their hosting company would prefer to remain anonymous, too.