What is the difference between SONM and …
The question “How SONM differs from Project N” arises with an enviable periodicity.
This morning it caught up with me again, as a message to Telegram from a colleague:
Hi, Sasha! There is a question about the product. We need people to convince us that we are better / more interesting than these guys. Or at least comparable to them :)
Well, let’s see… I don’t claim a complete objective comparison, because the evaluation of the project was done solely on the basis of Forbes article.
But in order to see the differences, it seems that this is enough.
Don’t wait for the beautiful pictures, this article is written in private, and it isn’t worth it to distract our designer.
Xunlei business model:
- Production and sale of special devices, similar to NAS.
- Private users purchase devices and gain access to the company’s services while at the same time becoming members of the network themselves and providing their resources (network connection, disk space) to a common resource pool.
The company issued tokens, which users:
- can earn by providing their company resources;
- can spend on the acquisition of company services.
Due the article, the company is focused on providing services in the field of data storage and CDN.
The success of the business model depends on the ability of the company:
- to attract consumers in purchasing their devices;
- to produce their devices in the required quantity.
The article compares Xunlei to Uber and Airbnb, but it isn’t entirely correct.
Uber doesn’t offer its drivers to buy a special car, then to earn with it, providing taxi services.
Airbnb doesn’t offer its landlords to spend money on buying an apartment first, then rent it out.
Clients (although, rather, suppliers, the correct term — contributors) of these companies ALREADY have their resources, and can benefit from their inclusion in the company’s service.
Uber or Airbnb contributor has a universal resource. It doesn’t depend on the company’s policy, its competitiveness, the emergence of new equipment models, the company’s sustainability. When there are more profitable options for using resources (cars, living space) — contributor can easily switch there.
Xunlei contributors are forced to purchase special equipment produced by the company.
In this case, Xunlei devices are specific, and are tightly tied to the services and business model of the company. And, for this reason, — are useless in isolation from the Xunlei services ecosystem.
Thus, Xunlei is a company with traditional model. Trying to decentralize their computing resources by dividing them into small computing devices, remove these devices to the consumer electronics market and shift the responsibility for their support to it’s clients.
What is SONM, and what is differ us from Xunlei?
Indeed, what?
In fact, the question “what is SONM” can mean at least three different answers:
- SONM as a company;
- SONM as a platform;
- SONM as an ecosystem for building third-party services.
Let’s look at all three (not very detailed).
As a company, SONM is a software developer.
The company aims to create a completely decentralized service for renting computing power that can compete with traditional cloud service providers.
The site for capacity renting is implemented using blockchain technology and smart contracts, which means that there is no single operator. All the interaction between the supplier (hardware owner) and the customer of the service is automated, and is made directly (P2P). Execution of payments is realized through the logic of a smart contract.
The launch of the platform is scheduled for the end of June 2018. Currently, technology is passing an open public tests.
Development is carried out under the license of free software with open source.
SONM as a platform.
SONM platform allows you to connect any modern computer like common home PC and above (including mining equipment based on standard PCs and even spare computing resources of data centers).
The goal is to utilize free computing resources by giving it to anyone who is willing to pay real money for it.
The purchase of special equipment for this is not required, it is enough to install and configure the SONM platform software.
Platform is completely free for hardware owners, and does not require the purchase of special equipment.
Any PC running Linux x64 (even if Linux is running on a virtual machine) can be connected to the SONM platform, and involved to performing real-world computing tasks.
There are all types of PC resources can be used:
- computing on a graphics processor (GPU);
- calculations on the central processor (CPU);
- storage;
- RAM;
- network bandwidth.
At the same time, the rent of computing resources is performed according to the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) model, which is comparable to the rent of a dedicated server from a traditional сloud provider (for example, Amazon EC2).
Renting computing resources, the consumer can use them to perform any computing tasks (that is, the execution of any application).
This opens up wide possibilities for using the service, in particular, but not limited to:
- training and execution of already trained neural networks (ML);
- rendering of computer graphics;
- decentralized storage of information (including data storage and CDN, similar to Xunlei service, but not limited to, because the technology allows executing any software solutions, for example, relational databases, key-value DB, object and file storages);
- GRID calculations (usually distributed computing to solve scientific problems).
In this case, the calculations are performed in an isolated environment (Docker container), which ensures that the executable code does not influence other processes running on the same PC, and also opens up the possibilities for flexible scaling of calculations and building fault-tolerant systems.
The main difference between the platform and similar in ideology projects:
- the possibility of efficient use of graphics processors (GPU), very popular in computer graphics rendering and machine learning tasks.
- possibility to guarantee the income to the owner of the equipment (at a level not lower than the revenue generated by using the same equipment for cryptocurrency mining).
Due to this, it is expected to involve a large pool of resources with GPUs (from owners of mining farms who want to increase their income from mining by fulfilling the tasks of the real sector, which are more expensive in relation to mining).
All accountings between suppliers and consumers are made in cryptocurrency (SNM tokens). At the same time, the prices on the trading platform are tied to USD, which reduces the impact of the volatility of the exchange value of the SNM token.
Price policy
Since the network does not have a single operator, a competitive pricing model is used:
- suppliers agree on the price with consumers,
- consumers compete in price for computing resources they need.
In aim to form basic prices for computing resources, there are “automated buyers” on the market, placing orders for the rental of resources for the cryptocurrency mining.
This allows us to guarantee revenue to all owners of computing resources, even in the lack of customers with real computing tasks.
Benefits of the platform
For hardware owners:
- Guaranteed income, not lower than the level brought with the use of the same equipment for cryptocurrency mining.
- The ability to increase the base income by performing real computing tasks.
- The ability to use all types of computing resources of the PC, which also increases the potential revenue (using the same equipment for mining, only the use of a graphics processor brings revenue, all other PC resources remain unclaimed).
- Low entry threshold (no additional spendings for hardware are required to connect the SONM platform).
For customers:
- Low prices:
The cost of comparable resources with a GPU from a traditional Cloud provider can exceed the revenue from mining by ten or more times, which allows the buyer to rent these resources in SONM five or more times cheaper, while offering the owner of the resource an attractive price.
- Performing on SONM-rented resources of any user applications, without the need to refine them.
Docker container isolation technology is widely known and adopted, and allows executing any applications for Linux. Most popular products on the market already have images for execution in the Docker environment, and if necessary, the user can create his own image for executing any custom code.
I won’t write about the shortcomings, with this will cope without me :-).
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SONM as a platform for building third-party services
Due to the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) model and openness, the SONM platform can be used as a platform for implementing third-party services of a higher level:
- PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) — for example, scalable file and object repositories, databases “out of the box”;
- SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) — for example, cloud-based rendering software, CDN and other network services, and much more.
These services can be based on the logic of attracting resources connected to SONM. Hiding from the users the internal complexity behind the external simplicity. That is, sell the service, renting the resources necessary for its provision in SONM, and hiding this process from the user. And, of course, getting on this a certain profit due to the difference in the price of the service and rented resources.
Some such tasks even included into the SONM Challenge (the link at the end of the article).
My gratitude to all who have finished reading. I propose to draw conclusions for you.
The above information isn’t of an advertising nature. And it isn’t an investment advice.
Honestly, I’m just making my life easier, because when that such question will appear again, it will be easier for me to answer it, simply by giving a link to this article :-)
If someone wants to discuss — I invite you to Telegram, there it is much easier to do.
Actually, this is a translation of my post written in Russian couple of days ago. But I have thought that it may be interesting for English-speaking auditory.
Telegram (technical questions): https://t.me/SONMbetatest
SONM Docs: https://docs.sonm.com
Fog Computing Challenge: https://sonm.com/challenge/
