Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0 • Hacker News Board

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#31

Post by jamwt » Tue, Nov 10, 2015, 6:03 PM UTC

Worth pointing out (for those of you not in the storage game) that these appliances, while cool, are pretty far from state of the art. We're (Dropbox) packing up to an order of magnitude more storage into 4U. And costs aren't close, let alone the addressable throughput given that you guys just went to 10G.

Serious kudos though are due for the Backblaze blog. You're all at least talking about what you're up to, which is awesome both for education around building large storage systems and establishing transparency with your customer base.

Unfortunately, a lot of the bigger clusters' teams won't/can't talk about what exactly they're doing and how they're doing it for trade secret reasons. If you want to learn about it, you have to come work for one of us. :-)

Also, the orangered hardware looks awesome.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#32

Post by atYevP » Tue, Nov 10, 2015, 6:04 PM UTC

mdamore wrote: post #16

Great to see a smaller, very open company remaining competitive against the giants in the space like Amazon. I'm particularly excited to see how their B2 service will stack up to Glacier for half the cost.

Yev from Backblaze here -> We're pretty excited about it. Beta users are providing some good feedback too! We think it'll definitely be the right choice for a lot of folks!

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#33

Post by wyldfire » Tue, Nov 10, 2015, 6:06 PM UTC

It's astonishing that Backblaze would release its drawings as open source, good for you!

But there's no explicit license declaration anywhere in the drawings zipfile and in fact some of the drawings claim "PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS DRAWING IS THE SOLE PROPERTY OF BACKBLAZE MANUFACTURING. ANY REPRODUCTION IN PART OR AS A WHOLE WITHOUT THE WRITTEN PERMISSION OF BACKBLAZE MANUFACTURING IS PROHIBITED".

Maybe it's just boilerplate? Or maybe you really don't want to face competition in your specific industry. Regardless, an official open source license (even with commercial restrictions) would be much clearer than this.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#34

Post by scurvy » Tue, Nov 10, 2015, 6:08 PM UTC

jamwt wrote: post #31

Worth pointing out (for those of you not in the storage game) that these appliances, while cool, are pretty far from state of the art. We're (Dropbox) packing up to an order of magnitude more storage into 4U. And costs aren't close, let alone the addressable throughput given that you guys just went to 10G. Serious kudos though are due for the Backblaze blog. You're all at least talking about what you're up to, which…

You're running 4U Quanta T21P-4U boxes but with 40gig OCP mezzanine networking now?

I hope you guys aren't using SMR drives...

Edit: Also, when are you going to move out of AWS? I really would like our/your clients to use IPv6.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#35

Post by amelius » Tue, Nov 10, 2015, 6:09 PM UTC

I just posted a link to an interesting blog post detailing the risks of building a storage pod [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10541055

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#36

Post by ape4 » Tue, Nov 10, 2015, 6:12 PM UTC

Maybe by releasing the plans it will cause other folks to buy it and reduce costs.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#37

Post by atYevP » Tue, Nov 10, 2015, 6:15 PM UTC

wyldfire wrote: post #33

It's astonishing that Backblaze would release its drawings as open source, good for you! But there's no explicit license declaration anywhere in the drawings zipfile and in fact some of the drawings claim "PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS DRAWING IS THE SOLE PROPERTY OF BACKBLAZE MANUFACTURING. ANY REPRODUCTION IN PART OR AS A WHOLE WITHOUT THE WRITTEN PERMISSION OF BACKBLAZE MANUFACTURI…

Yev from Backblaze here -> That is boilerplate for the most part, but it's open source, have at it!

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#38

Post by atYevP » Tue, Nov 10, 2015, 6:17 PM UTC

derekp7 wrote: post #17

atYevP wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yev from Backblaze -> We don't need the boot drive to be that "large", but it's more of a pricing thing. An SSD, even at 256GB would be more expensive than those 5400RPM drives, so we just go with what's cheap :)

What about network boot? Or do you find that to be too unreliable?

Not 100% sure if we've given that any thorough testing, but the ops team is looking at most available options before building these out. That said, if they haven't tried it, they'll read this and give it a go :)

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#39

Post by budmang » Tue, Nov 10, 2015, 6:21 PM UTC

jamwt wrote: post #31

Worth pointing out (for those of you not in the storage game) that these appliances, while cool, are pretty far from state of the art. We're (Dropbox) packing up to an order of magnitude more storage into 4U. And costs aren't close, let alone the addressable throughput given that you guys just went to 10G. Serious kudos though are due for the Backblaze blog. You're all at least talking about what you're up to, which…

> packing up to an order of magnitude more storage into 4U

Where are you buying 40 TB hard drives? I'd love to get some ;-)

We actually don't claim these are 'state of the art', more 'state of the inexpensive'. You can buy faster performance storage servers, more redundant servers, etc. But I believe these are one of, if not the, lowest cost storage servers per GB. (And of course, open source.)

BTW, I'm a fan of Dropbox (use it personally) and, in general, think there is a ton of value in developers, organizations, and companies sharing what they've learned about storage. The better and lower cost it gets, the more interesting things other people can do with it, the bigger the industry, and the more everyone benefits.

(full disclosure - cofounder of Backblaze here)

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#40

Post by atYevP » Tue, Nov 10, 2015, 6:25 PM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #29

atYevP wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question! As part of the process for developing these we spend months and months using AGILE/SCRUM to iterate and come up with a "final answer" (though we're constantly still iterating). So it's not so much that we gain anything from writing the posts, the posts are more of a culmination of months of effort. We do end up talking about the pods more closely when we're writing the posts and as part of that some mi…

I imagine the marketing angle must be pretty big. Not only making people aware of your service, but convincing people to use it. A big question when selecting any online backup service is, "are these people I'm trusting with my data complete idiots?" Your posts should really help convince a lot of people that you are, in fact, not complete idiots. For what it's worth, I've been a happy customer for years and try to s…

You'd think it would be HUGE but it's not, just a side-benefit. We'd love for it to be bigger, but, it's kind of up to the people. If you're a happy Backblaze customer though...might I refer you to our handy dandy referral program: https://www.backblaze.com/refer.html

/MarketingOff

*Edit -> man, we have to optimize that page for our new design layout...

/yells at design team.