Filecoin Golden Gate upgrade: Distributed Storage Alliance (DSA) reduces distributed storage costs by 40%

Original source: Filecoin Network

June 29, 2023 - The Distributed Storage Alliance (DSA) brings together technology industry leaders to help enterprises transition to using distributed storage technologies through education, advocacy, and best practices. DSA joins hands with Protocol Labs and Supranational to launch the first advanced software and reference configurations that will fundamentally optimize data storage on the Filecoin network. The new software significantly reduces costs for network participants, making it easier to become a Filecoin storage provider and bring data into the network. These network optimizations promote the development of distributed storage technology, promote the development of the industry, and will enhance the further application of enterprises.

Daniel León, Head of the Protocol Labs Alliance, said: "Optimization of the new open source software has resulted in significant performance improvements and reduced the cost of uploading data to the Filecoin network. The first DSA release will eliminate data upload bottlenecks and bring the distributed storage industry to the next level." 40% reduction in overall storage costs."

The Filecoin network needs to perform computations on the data carried to ensure network security, while enabling cryptographic proof, verifiability, and data immutability. However, the hardware required to perform this process, the "package," often accounts for more than 50% of the total hardware cost. This creates challenges for new storage providers working to join the network and existing providers looking to enhance data upload capabilities. To address this issue, we are excited to announce the release of new software** that will optimize data uploads to the Filecoin network, reducing packaging server costs by 90%. **With this software, network participants can benefit from reduced computing costs and also experience enhanced computing power. See below for a breakdown of cost and performance metric calculations, although the benchmark is for CC, we expect to see similar results for non-CC as well.

**I'm happy to introduce new software optimizations and optimized hardware reference configurations, the impact on storage providers will vary based on individual hardware and setup. **Nevertheless, performance gains and cost reductions are foreseen across the ecosystem, with 75-85% higher throughput for PC 2 and C 2 and direct integration into Lotus. ** New optimized software and optimized hardware reduce packaged server costs for storage providers by up to 90%, resulting in a 40% reduction in the total cost of distributed storage. **As an example, buying a packaged server used to cost over $200,000 per day to package 20 TiB. Today, it costs less than $25,000 to package 20 TiB per day. At the same time, operating costs have dropped significantly, as a single server can now efficiently handle all encapsulation tasks, achieving more than six times the throughput.

Kelly Olson, co-founder of Supranational, said: "Improving the performance of cryptographic operations in Filecoin's proof-of-replication and zero-knowledge proofs is key to enabling new use cases and scaling the network. By dramatically reducing the costs associated with this encryption, distributed storage can be even better." compete with centralized products.”

This early GA release was open-sourced under a license agreement and is now accessible to all storage providers in the Filecoin network, allowing network participants to conduct research and begin testing new software. Along with the release of the software, DSA is releasing an optimized hardware reference configuration, which will enable storage providers and service providers interested in the full suite of optimizations to start planning to build optimized hardware configurations for this new optimized software.

While GA early releases provide basic initial access to new software, subsequent releases will bring more optimized benefits to the ecosystem. Open-source coordination software and the DSA reference architecture will simplify adoption of the new software out-of-the-box, hardware upgrade instructions will provide guidance on how to update current hardware configurations, and PC 2 and C 2 optimizations will be integrated directly into Lotus in Q3.

If you want to explore and test this early release, please visit the DSA website.