Filecoin Golden Gate Upgrade: Distributed Storage Alliance (DSA) to Lower Distributed Storage Costs by 40%

Source: Filecoin Network

June 29, 2023 - The Distributed Storage Alliance (DSA), a collective of industry leaders, is facilitating the transition to distributed storage technology for businesses through education, promotion, and best practices. DSA, in collaboration with Protocol Labs and Supranational, has launched advanced software and reference configurations that will optimize data storage on the Filecoin network at its core. The new software significantly lowers the cost for network participants, making it easier for them to become Filecoin storage providers and bring data into the network. These network optimizations foster the development of distributed storage technology, drive industry growth, and enhance further applications for businesses.

Daniel León, the head of the Protocol Labs Alliance, stated, "The optimization of this new open-source software has yielded noticeable performance improvements and reduced the cost of uploading data to the Filecoin network. The initial release of DSA will eliminate data upload bottlenecks and lower overall storage costs for the distributed storage industry by 40%."

Filecoin network needs to perform calculations on the loaded data to ensure network security, while achieving encryption proof, verifiability, and data immutability. However, the hardware required to perform this process, known as "sealing," often accounts for more than 50% of the total hardware cost. This poses challenges for new storage providers looking to join the network and existing providers seeking to enhance their data upload capabilities. To address this issue, we are pleased to announce the release of new software that will optimize data upload on the Filecoin network, reducing the cost of sealing servers by 90%. Through this software, network participants can benefit from reduced computational costs and experience enhanced computing capabilities. Please refer to the detailed cost and performance benchmarks below. Although the benchmarks are specific to CC, we hope to see similar results in non-CC environments.

I am pleased to introduce the new software optimization and optimized hardware reference configuration. The impact on storage providers will vary based on individual hardware and settings. However, the entire ecosystem can expect performance improvements and cost reductions. Throughput for PC 2 and C 2 will increase by 75-85% and will be directly integrated into Lotus. The new optimized software and hardware reduce packaging server costs for storage providers by up to 90%, resulting in a 40% overall reduction in distributed storage costs. For example, in the past, the cost of packaging 20 TiB per day exceeded $200,000. Today, the cost of packaging 20 TiB per day is less than $25,000. Meanwhile, operational costs have also decreased significantly as a single server can now efficiently handle all packaging tasks, achieving more than six times the throughput.

Co-founder of Supranational, Kelly Olson, said, "Improving the performance of encryption operations in Filecoin's replication proof and zero-knowledge proof is crucial for implementing new use cases and expanding the network. By significantly reducing the costs associated with this type of encryption, distributed storage can better compete with centralized products."

The early version of this GA is open source under a license agreement and is now accessible to all storage providers in the Filecoin network. Network participants can now research and begin testing the new software. Along with the software release, DSA has also released optimized hardware reference configurations, allowing storage providers and service providers interested in the full optimization to start planning optimized hardware configurations for this new software.

While the early version of the GA provides basic preliminary access to the new software, subsequent versions will bring more optimization benefits to the ecosystem. Open-source coordination software and DSA reference architecture will simplify the use of the ready-to-use new software. Hardware upgrade instructions will provide guidance on how to update the current hardware configuration, and the PC 2 and C 2 optimizations will be directly integrated into Lotus in the third quarter.

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