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Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

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Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#101

Post by greglindahl »

DanWaterworth wrote: post #90
greglindahl wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reliability has a cost, too. You can get a 60GB SSD for cheap (Amazon suggests it's about the same price as the slow 500GB HDD), and the SSD will fail at a much lower rate than that HDD.

When you have another 60 HDDs in the same case, I guess you think about reliability differently.

The 60 HDDs aren't single points of failure. {Edit: I mean for the server, not for the whole system.}

And a raid1 pair of HDDs for the system disk is more expensive than a small SSD, more fussy, and the SSD is still less likely to totally fail.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#102

Post by [deleted] »

DanWaterworth wrote: post #90
greglindahl wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reliability has a cost, too. You can get a 60GB SSD for cheap (Amazon suggests it's about the same price as the slow 500GB HDD), and the SSD will fail at a much lower rate than that HDD.

When you have another 60 HDDs in the same case, I guess you think about reliability differently.

[deleted]

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#103

Post by budmang »

lqdc13 wrote: post #99

Wow, all the components are crazy overpriced. You can get the same system built for probably 1/3 the price with the same level of quality. Example is the motherboard for $500+, the fans for $20 each, on off switch for $25, 8gb of DDR3 ram for $90???? etc. The saving grace is the hard drives that are decently priced and make up the bulk of the cost.

Links? We love getting feedback, especially if we're overpaying for a particular component?

Gleb

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#104

Post by codemac »

hrez wrote: post #91
chx wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 96 bay 4U chassis is readily available http://www.raidinc.com/products/object-storage/ability-4u-96... but that's still not a magnitude.

That's just a storage enclosure. You'd need a separate server with SAS connectivity to use that. It still may be worth it $$/Gb wise depending on cost.

They have an Intel Atom addon module thingie, but the CPU can only really run 2x4Gb best case, almost all of these will need separate software running on Xeons.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#105

Post by BinaryIdiot »

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…

> 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.

So basically you decided to go into this thread, post something that isn't possible for anyone here to corroborate and call the original post "far from state of the art"...to what end? What was the purpose of your posting? Just to toot your own horn? I don't get it.

If you want to talk about how awesome or state of the art your company does things then great do that. But your actual post? It just comes off as childish like someone showing off they can do something and you're that person that has to stand in between them and the people watching them to say you can do it too and better. Surely we've all seen those very awkward moments in sitcoms.

> We're (Dropbox) packing up to an order of magnitude more storage into 4U.

Are you sure? They can pack up to 180TB into 4U so you're saying DropBox can pack up to 1,800TB into 4U?

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#106

Post by [deleted] »

budmang wrote: post #100
howeyc wrote: post #95

Interesting, with this information and some idea of what they pay for electricity +support staff/drive replacements/maintenance you could probably figure out their break-even mark. Their cost for the pod (which they say includes labor) comes out to 0.044/GB. The cost of redundancy is 3/20 drives, which would place the cost to 0.0517/GB of data. They are planning to charge 0.005/GB on the B2 service this is made for.…

Excellent analysis. There are some other costs involved (bandwidth, switches/cabinets, non-pod servers, etc.), but pods & drives dominate the costs, so your math is good. You're also right that 1 TB is the approximate breakeven between Backblaze per-GB cloud storage & unlimited online backup by cost and most people are below that. However, the main reason for people to use the backup service is that we take care of a…

[deleted]

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#107

Post by mSparks »

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…

I'd say it's more Dropbox getting nervous.

Dropbox wants all this trade secret non sense.

And everyone else give them their data.

That they promise they won't read.

Give me a break. Bittorrent sync and blaze pods in house for the win.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#108

Post by toomuchtodo »

budmang wrote: post #96
wyldfire wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not trying to align with any movement. Just saying that we give the design away. Appreciate all the feedback and we'll re-look at adding a license. To be clear on our philosophy - we don't want to restrict people from building these for their own purposes, modifying them, giving away the design, selling the boxes, etc.

I'd suggest using the following Creative Commons license:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#109

Post by DanWaterworth »

greglindahl wrote: post #101
DanWaterworth wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you have another 60 HDDs in the same case, I guess you think about reliability differently.

The 60 HDDs aren't single points of failure. {Edit: I mean for the server, not for the whole system.} And a raid1 pair of HDDs for the system disk is more expensive than a small SSD, more fussy, and the SSD is still less likely to totally fail.

It doesn't sound like the boot drive is a single point of failure since data is stored Reed-Solomon coded in chunks across many pods. If one data drive fails, the whole pod has to go down for maintenance for it to be replaced. The only difference is that you get to choose when to take a pod down for maintenance to replace a data drive.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#110

Post by atYevP »

thoughtpalette wrote: post #82
atYevP wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Hi Yev! I commented on a previous post about Backblaze cloud storage and if it was at a point to replace S3 for static assets. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10259507 "Is this going to work for static asset hosting such as for low cost FE assets? Can this be set to serve an index file from the root directory? Doe's it provide you a public URL to your (stealing s3 terms) bucket? Just curious as to why I would mi…

Yes...we're making some ;-)

https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html

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