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Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

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Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#191

Post by PhantomGremlin »

basch wrote: post #156
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…

up to an order of magnitude more 5x the density so half an order of magnitude, which is much more believable?

an order of magnitude

Many years ago I liked to say that, and a friend would call me out. So I would promptly change my statement to "a binary order of magnitude".

5x the density

Maybe he should be saying "a quinary order of magnitude"? :)

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#192

Post by scurvy »

olavgg wrote: post #159
scurvy wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That fits the WORM profile that I suggested. During normal operation, the disk IOPS is the bottleneck. The network only becomes the bottleneck during repair/failure states. Even scrubbing falls under disk IOPS and not network. At least that's what I've found in EC clusters. Replicated clusters might be different.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#194

Post by qaq »

keypusher wrote: post #142
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

I don't work at Dropbox, but I do work in storage. I've seen similar systems pack ~250-500TB into a 4U box. 60 drives x 6TB drives = 360TB. Not sure how you would get anywhere over 1000TB with today's spinning drives. There is a vendor linked in Backblaze blog post (45drives) which sells 60 drive enclosures, which they somehow list at 480TB but I'm not sure how the math works out there. However, keep in mind that usa…

supermicro has 72 drive server and 90 drives JBOD

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#195

Post by sneak »

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.…

This seems obvious, as the largest MacBook or MBAir one can buy is 512GB.

Also, the B2 service doesn't come with a backup client, AFAIK.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#196

Post by sneak »

wyldfire wrote: post #54
atYevP wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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." ;)

Why, are you planning on reproducing the drawings? Copyright on the drawings has nothing to do with producing the objects described therein. You don't need a license to cook from a recipe.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#197

Post by dmourati »

qaq wrote: post #194
keypusher wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't work at Dropbox, but I do work in storage. I've seen similar systems pack ~250-500TB into a 4U box. 60 drives x 6TB drives = 360TB. Not sure how you would get anywhere over 1000TB with today's spinning drives. There is a vendor linked in Backblaze blog post (45drives) which sells 60 drive enclosures, which they somehow list at 480TB but I'm not sure how the math works out there. However, keep in mind that usa…

supermicro has 72 drive server and 90 drives JBOD

We used these and affectionately called them the mullet as in business in the front, party in the rear.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4u/847/sc847de26-...

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#198

Post by atYevP »

voltagex_ wrote: post #187
atYevP wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prices for the HDDs themselves? Doubtful, but maybe. The nice thing about consumer-grade HDDs is that consumers are not very price elastic, meaning if consumer HDD prices go up too much, consumers will just stop buying them (we saw this happen after the Thailand Drive Crisis). Hopefully what it'll mean is that drive manufacturers will instead start making lower-cost "professional" drives for this exact purpose. Cheap…

I still haven't been able to work out if prices ever went back to pre-Thailand prices. It pretty much coincided with the beginning of the Aussie dollar becoming worthless so that's skewed things a bit.

Well, at least in the States it's gotten pretty close to those levels if not gone down to slightly below them. Not sure where that relates to the Aussie dollar though :-(

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#199

Post by atYevP »

KNoureen wrote: post #181

The main problem I have with Backblaze and AWS is that there is no budget limit on transfers. I would like to tell the provider; limit downloads to $500, then reply 509 to further requests.

Backblaze B2 will have that, we'll have spending thresholds in place.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#200

Post by atYevP »

amenod wrote: post #150

Naive question: wouldn't it be possible with SSD drives (which are mainly just chips, right?) to make the drives as boards and put them in 1U / 2U / 4U chassis? I mean, who need the HDD dimensions when you are fitting the drives inside server units anyway?

Yev from Backblaze -> Not naive! You could definitely reconfigure the design to hold SSDs, but that would add cost, which is something we're really concerned about. But the short answer is yes, you can use SSDs, though it increases the cost per GB.
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