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Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

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Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#51

Post by jtmarmon »

budmang wrote: post #44
cenal wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What license is it under?

"Think free as in free speech, not free beer." It's not under any license, it's just 'free'. We've talked about putting the Storage Pods under a license, and may at some point since we get this question periodically and picking a license that people are familiar with may make it more clear that we really are giving away the design.

i might be wrong, but i'm fairly certain you have rights that you need to explicitly give up in the form of a license in order for it to be "free"

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#52

Post by atYevP »

mikeash wrote: post #45
atYevP wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for the link. I was actually going to write something in my comment like, "hey, you guys should have a referral program." Then I realized I ought to check to see if you already did first.

We do, but man do I gotta get that page updated. Looks like we forgot about it while updating the site. Sad panda bears.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#53

Post by beachstartup »

codemac wrote: post #49
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…

What order of magnitude? There are 60 drive chassis in 4U you can get[0][1], but even a 4TB -> 6TB drive + 15 more drives isn't exactly an order of magnitude. And they have 2 10GiB ports, though I'm sure you can work with them and get more.. It's disingenuous to call this not "state of the art" when it's really quite close, and obviously is meeting a backblaze design goal. [0]: http://www.newisys.com/Products/4600.sh…

you can fit 72 x 8TB pretty easily into 4u with off-the-shelf hardware.

with custom-built 2.5" ssd enclosures you could probably fit more in the same space.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#54

Post by wyldfire »

atYevP wrote: post #37
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!

Ok I will email my attorney that "Some guy named atYevP on HN told me it was okay." ;)

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#55

Post by Poiesis »

budmang wrote: post #44
cenal wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What license is it under?

"Think free as in free speech, not free beer." It's not under any license, it's just 'free'. We've talked about putting the Storage Pods under a license, and may at some point since we get this question periodically and picking a license that people are familiar with may make it more clear that we really are giving away the design.

Seems like the Creative Commons licenses were designed for this use case: easy to understand formalizations of just what rights if any are reserved. Maybe pick one of those?

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#56

Post by jamwt »

budmang wrote: post #39
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 Drop…

Hi Gleb!

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

Me too. :-) Not 40TB, but larger than 4T and quite a few more of them.

> But I believe these are one of, if not the, lowest cost storage servers per GB.

Yep, I meant price per GB as well.

> I'm a fan of Dropbox (use it personally)

Awesome, thanks! I've not used Backblaze personally, but I know some friends who do and they're happy customers. Your guys' blog and rapport with the technical community is amazing.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#57

Post by wyldfire »

budmang wrote: post #44
cenal wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What license is it under?

"Think free as in free speech, not free beer." It's not under any license, it's just 'free'. We've talked about putting the Storage Pods under a license, and may at some point since we get this question periodically and picking a license that people are familiar with may make it more clear that we really are giving away the design.

That quote refers to something very specific and you may not want to align yourself or your thoughts about licensing with that movement.

The creative commons and OSI are two excellent places to start looking at licenses. creativecommons.org and opensource.org

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#59

Post by jamwt »

codemac wrote: post #49
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…

What order of magnitude? There are 60 drive chassis in 4U you can get[0][1], but even a 4TB -> 6TB drive + 15 more drives isn't exactly an order of magnitude. And they have 2 10GiB ports, though I'm sure you can work with them and get more.. It's disingenuous to call this not "state of the art" when it's really quite close, and obviously is meeting a backblaze design goal. [0]: http://www.newisys.com/Products/4600.sh…

You can do a lot more than 60, and you can get a lot bigger than 6T.

> It's disingenuous to call this not "state of the art" when it's really quite close, and obviously is meeting a backblaze design goal.

So, I never said it didn't meet their design goal; it looks like quite a nice system, and it's better than their previous gen. Looks like they're doing things right, looks like solid engineering.

But I stand by the statement that, in the absolute sense, this is not quite the current benchmark on density or $/GB in the industry. That was the only point I was trying to make to the HN audience in general, and it's not intended as a critique of Backblaze specifically.

But there are very different amounts of resources (I'm assuming) invested in achieving those benchmarks than Backblaze can likely commit.

Ergo, Backblaze probably completely made the right decision for Backblaze. Both of these things are possible.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#60

Post by ausjke »

so this is cheaper than even glacier? and it supports client-side-encryption? and it will have a linux client (CLI is good enough)? if that's the case I'm sold.

in fact do you have the storage located in various locations? if so can I store a paid-copy to a separate location physically, just to be safe.

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