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Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

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Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#131

Post by garblegarble »

codemac wrote: post #83
jamwt wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> you can get a lot bigger than 6T Come on - most companies reasonably can't. There's a WD 10T smr/helium drive, and seagate is selling that crap 8T video drive. Unless you're talking ssd 3d/TLC density (more $), or the vapor-ware 20T drives that some storage vendors hint at and don't let me file a PO for, I literally don't know what you're referring to (now I'm getting where I can't name names) The reason I'm compla…

>seagate is selling that crap 8T video drive

Slightly off-topic but could you go into some detail on what you think the drawbacks are for the Seagate 8TB SMR drive? I've been thinking about getting a few for large files while keeping them online-accessible, I've found it difficult to get the thoughts of grizzled IT folks on the matter :-)

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#132

Post by mrmondo »

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…

So what's your performance, public cost breakdown and where's your open sourced design available?

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#133

Post by tomcam »

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.…

Plus depreciaton on equipment. While the drives are probably long gone over 5 years, it's possible the racks could survive much longer.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#134

Post by benjaminl »

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.…

One thing to keep in mind is that Backblaze keeps 1.15 copies of your data, while Amazon S3 and the like keep multiple full geographically redundant copies of your data. For example Microsoft Azure Cloud Storage keeps 3 to 6 copies of your data, depending on the tier, [1] when you compare that to the 1.15 copies in Backblaze B2 you start to understand where the pricing difference comes from.

For most use cases this doesn't matter and the price saving are well worth the reduced redundancy, but Backblaze B2 isn't well suited for being the canonical store of your data.

[1] - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#135

Post by Ramattack »

budmang wrote: post #48
venomsnake wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just needed to think of something big. Anyway there is big stuff that is not that important - lets say couple of gigabytes of logs but nice to have. BB folder and file type structure makes it relatively hard to back up just some files of given type. And some stuff like tars and zips could be arbitrary in size and importance.

We definitely focus on ease-of-backup vs. choices-for-backup. One of the initial things we found we the "pick and choose files & folders to backup" approach is what kept most people from setting up a backup at all because they were confused by the process. Having said that, we offer the ability to exclude folders and filetypes if you have certain things you want to backup later. (Not disagreeing with anything you're…

As curiosity which os and file system are you running Gleb?

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#136

Post by mrmondo »

Great work Backblaze! I really appreciate the open, knowledge sharing nature of your hardware designs. This is one of the main reasons I am a Backblaze customer, I must say however that the lack of open source and headless Linux client software is seriously pushing me away, it's something I think many people have been waiting for years for, especially given the product licensing model is designed as such to backup a single machine only.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#137

Post by michaelt »

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…

  What order of magnitude?
Well, this article describes storage pods with 180TB of storage.

HGST have a 10TB hard drive measuring 26.1mm * 101.6mm * 147mm [1] and a 4U chassis measures 178mm * 437mm * 521mm [2]

If you had 4U of hard drives with no space for power, cooling, interconnect etc you cold fit 10 terabytes / (26.1mm * 101.6mm * 147mm) * (178mm * 437mm * 521mm) = 1.04 petabytes into 4U

I don't know whether six times counts a a single order of magnitude, let alone multiple orders of magnitude, and the 10TB hard drives I linked are "enterprise" so there might be a substantial price premium.

Samsung claim to have a 16TB 2.5" SSD in the works [2] - although details are pretty scarce at the moment. If its dimensions match normal 2.5" SSDs at around 100mm * 70mm * 6.9mm that would give 16 terabytes / (100mm * 70mm * 7mm) * (178mm * 437mm * 521mm) = 13.2 petabytes in 4U.

Of course, the assumption you could use 100% of the space in a chassis for drives is pretty unrealistic. And nobody's seen the Samsung SSD working - could be a 16tb sticker on a 1tb ssd for all I know :) Filling it with 4TB SSDs would give you 3.35 PB and it actually seems possible to get those [4].

If you don't care about $/TB, it's probably possible to get density a single order of magnitude higher.

[1] http://www.hgst.com/products/hard-drives/ultrastar-archive-h... [2] http://www.supermicro.co.uk/products/chassis/4U/842/SC842TQ-... [3] http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2015/08/samsung-unveils-2-5... [4] https://www.sandisk.com/business/datacenter/products/flash-d...

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#139

Post by atYevP »

Ramattack wrote: post #135
budmang wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We definitely focus on ease-of-backup vs. choices-for-backup. One of the initial things we found we the "pick and choose files & folders to backup" approach is what kept most people from setting up a backup at all because they were confused by the process. Having said that, we offer the ability to exclude folders and filetypes if you have certain things you want to backup later. (Not disagreeing with anything you're…

As curiosity which os and file system are you running Gleb?

Are you asking about him personally, or on the Pods?

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#140

Post by coldtea »

atYevP wrote: post #27
mikeash wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you find any internal benefits from this stuff as well? For example, having it be better documented, or finding areas of improvement as you go through the write-up, or things like that? Not that you need it to be directly helpful, warm and fuzzy can certainly be enough....

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…

Can you guys enable "non attached" external disk backups? Put a cap on the size or make it a different tier.
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