Why observability backends break at petabyte scale, and how erasure coding, multi-TB/s ingest, and a single namespace change the economics. Includes the full traditional vs. AIStor comparison.
A global streaming platform runs AIStor across 10+ data centers, including dedicated clusters for logging and metrics. 84PB usable, 150–200Gbps egress, and a 3x traffic spike absorbed at 11ms average response time.
The cost problem, written for the person who owns the budget. Where observability spend goes, and which architectural choices move it.
Ingest and indexing fees compound with every gigabyte, the exact cost curve Datadog built BYOC Logs to break. AIStor, as a BYOC Logs storage backend, prices on usable capacity with no per-operation or egress charges, so the bill stays predictable as volumes grow.
Datadog's default SaaS retention window is 15 days — legacy tiering pushes anything older into archive tiers with retrieval measured in hours. With AIStor behind BYOC Logs, all data stays on one high-performance tier. Search last quarter's logs as fast as yesterday's, with no rehydration delay and no cold-tier penalty.
Residency mandates, audit requirements, and internal policy keep telemetry on-prem. AIStor is software-defined and runs on commodity hardware in your data center, at the edge, or air-gapped, with WORM immutability and fine-grained access control, while Datadog continues to analyze it from where it already lives.
Legacy object platforms hit hard ceilings at 20 to 30PB, forcing cluster splits that fragment your searchable history across separate systems with no unified way to query it. AIStor scales as a single logical namespace from your first terabyte to your first exabyte, so growth never breaks your original architecture.
