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Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

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Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#151

Post by scurvy »

jamwt wrote: post #113
codemac wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> You merely state that it's just not state of the art, and to come work at dropbox. That's about all I can do. However... > This is what I mean by being disingenuous. I'm don't think disingenuous is what I'm being. Maybe I'm not being as forthcoming as you'd like. Maybe my comment wasn't useful without details I'm not providing. But I'm not lying or misrepresenting anything. So let me try to be helpful without using…

So you are using SMR drives. Wow, good luck with that. All the flash front-end caching in the world won't improve the miserable performance of those drives. I guess that's the only way to justify moving out of AWS?

I'd really like to see some usage stats on your SMR clusters because so far the universal verdict is that they're terrible for anything other than WORM.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#152

Post by atYevP »

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…

> Alas, Backblaze stock isn't yet available for sale ;-)

YET...or is it? /runs over to SecondMarket.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#153

Post by therobot24 »

josefresco wrote: post #128
therobot24 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it takes months to get everything backed up, and now the just the file lists or whatever is taking up 8GB+ on my disk (i use a smaller SSD as the primary drive so space is precious). I contacted support and their only solution is to create a new account and go through many more months of backing everything up again.

Does someone from BB want to jump in here and explain why this guys "file list" could be 8GB and how re-starting the sync will fix it? Sounds like something went awry.

This is what nathan from support told me when i contacted them:

"As part of our backup process, Backblaze will run a checksum against each file before uploading it. This requires the entire bzfileids.dat file to be loaded into RAM. After a long time, or if you have an extraordinarily large number of files, the bzfileids.dat file can grow large causing the Backblaze directory to appear bloated, and use more RAM (potentially slowing down your system). In your case your bzfileids are extremely large, likely because you have a lot of files and an older backup."

here's my backblaze folder: http://imgur.com/ohqUERr (i have my temporary data drive set to a secondary drive)

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#154

Post by basch »

benjaminl wrote: post #134
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 d…

given block level dedupe, Microsoft might have 6 copies of your data, but that block is shared between 50 users in each region. Adding a 51st person calling on that block costs nothing.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#155

Post by scurvy »

codemac wrote: post #87
beachstartup wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/6047/SSG-6047R-...

Surprised at the layout of the drives. Would make it a huge pain to actually replace failing disks - but I like that they put a decent Xeon on there. The connectivity to the drives is really quite bad, but now I'm just being picky. Thank you for the link, really appreciate the follow up!

This is the Quanta version, which is a bit better from a build standpoint: http://www.qct.io/Product/Storage/Storage-Server/4U/New-Quan...

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#156

Post by basch »

jamwt wrote: post #113
codemac wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> You merely state that it's just not state of the art, and to come work at dropbox. That's about all I can do. However... > This is what I mean by being disingenuous. I'm don't think disingenuous is what I'm being. Maybe I'm not being as forthcoming as you'd like. Maybe my comment wasn't useful without details I'm not providing. But I'm not lying or misrepresenting anything. So let me try to be helpful without using…

up to an order of magnitude more

5x the density

so half an order of magnitude, which is much more believable?

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#157

Post by [deleted] »

jamwt wrote: post #113
codemac wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> You merely state that it's just not state of the art, and to come work at dropbox. That's about all I can do. However... > This is what I mean by being disingenuous. I'm don't think disingenuous is what I'm being. Maybe I'm not being as forthcoming as you'd like. Maybe my comment wasn't useful without details I'm not providing. But I'm not lying or misrepresenting anything. So let me try to be helpful without using…

[deleted]

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#158

Post by lqdc13 »

budmang wrote: post #103
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

I guess it depends on the requirements a lot. Are you guys set on using ECC RAM and microATX mobo? It would be much cheaper to use some sort of gaming cpu + DDR4 non-ecc RAM.

For example, microatx mobo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157...

some non-ecc DDR4 ram: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231...

and a cpu: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117...

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#159

Post by olavgg »

scurvy wrote: post #151
jamwt wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You merely state that it's just not state of the art, and to come work at dropbox. That's about all I can do. However... > This is what I mean by being disingenuous. I'm don't think disingenuous is what I'm being. Maybe I'm not being as forthcoming as you'd like. Maybe my comment wasn't useful without details I'm not providing. But I'm not lying or misrepresenting anything. So let me try to be helpful without using…

So you are using SMR drives. Wow, good luck with that. All the flash front-end caching in the world won't improve the miserable performance of those drives. I guess that's the only way to justify moving out of AWS? I'd really like to see some usage stats on your SMR clusters because so far the universal verdict is that they're terrible for anything other than WORM.

SMR drives may have poor write performance, but still good enough). Read performance is good. Anyway I believe the network is the bottleneck anyway, not the drives.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#160

Post by atYevP »

mrmondo wrote: post #136

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…

Yev from Backblaze -> We're working on it, in a fashion. With Backblaze B2 you'll be able to push from a Linux machine using CLIs/APIs and get those computers backed up as well! Slightly different, but it's the best way for us to help Linux users!
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