61–70 of 116 posts
What does Backblaze do with all the removed HD that still work but maybe have a ton of cycles on them? Are they just recycled, or resold?
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Well, uh, yes. No one really expects that rotational rust will get much faster, and in fact history shows that, compared to the increase in density, the increase in transfer rates are laughable at best. Between 1990 and today you are probably looking at a 20 000 times increase in density, yet transfer rates only increased around a factor of around 150-200. [In fact, from the early 1960 to today it's only a factor of…
Is there a reason you couldn't use a second set of actuators?
You could probably do it if the platter diameter were reduced, which would then accordingly reduce capacity as well. At that point you could just as well use two drives and also get lower overall failure probability. Or you use SSD caches, or memory caches, ...
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Internally we're blaming our SEO people for putting to much crap on the blog itself ;) But yea, it's worth exploring - though we have our own servers that should be able to handle the load. We haven't had blog loading trouble in a while, so it'll be neat to debug this later :D
From the outside it looks like your running a fairly intensive Wordpress install on an Apache webserver with no page caching. Also seems there's no minification or combining of stylesheets/js and there are query strings on those static assets which is going to discourage caching. No wonder you need a datacenter to handle that kind of resource punishment! There are plenty of reasons to stick with Wordpress in a decent…
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Yev from Backblaze here -> have you checked out B2? We likely won't have a Linux client for our backup service any time soon, but our B2 service has a lot of integrators (like Cloudberry and Duplicity, HashBackup, etc..) that can back up Linux machines, a lot of folks have been going that route.
> We likely won't have a Linux client for our backup service any time soon Ok. But why ? Technical obstacles such as having to deal with distribution diversity - or is it a way of market segmentation ?
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. The underlying base of original client backup software was originally written from scratch on three platforms simultaneously: 1) Windows, 2) Macintosh, and 3) Linux. It was designed that way from the beginning. This code continues to compile every time we do a client release, simply as part of the process. However, it is entirely lacking a GUI layer and an installer - those were never written. The underlying backup engine runs even when the user is logged out or the GUI has stopped working.
So it is technically possible, but along the way we released Backblaze B2 (storage API) which not only supports Linux, we assume Linux is the primary customer! We're seeing if that can satisfy the Linux community. Backblaze B2 is a large ongoing effort consuming a lot of our software developer's time.
A note about limited resources: Backblaze never really raised any funding, there are no deep pockets, so we can ONLY hire an additional programmer when the products we sell throw off enough money to pay that salary. We run on really tight margins (thus our obsession with failure rates of drives) which is fabulous for our customers, but not so great for hiring lots of extra help to do projects like a Linux GUI. :-)
With hard drive size increasing so quickly but hard drive transfer speeds basically flat, I wonder if there are long-term implications for them with respect to recovery from backup and downtime. For example, if a whole rack goes down, and they are on 32TB drives in the future, for example, could it takes a week or more for their data to get online?
Well, uh, yes. No one really expects that rotational rust will get much faster, and in fact history shows that, compared to the increase in density, the increase in transfer rates are laughable at best. Between 1990 and today you are probably looking at a 20 000 times increase in density, yet transfer rates only increased around a factor of around 150-200. [In fact, from the early 1960 to today it's only a factor of…
Higher density means more data per track, not just more tracks per disk. You get an entire track per revolution so a track with more data is more MBps. So linear reads on a higher density drive are faster, and semi-linear accesses (ie, reading two files that are next to each other) do get faster.
I remember reading a story about a guy who built a drive array with high capacity 7200 RPM drives that got within 20% of the performance of the 10K RPM setup they had, by partitioning the drives at the same capacity as the 10K equivalent. The head only had half as many tracks to traverse, so worst case access time was better, and the higher density made up for the lower RPMs.
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I did, I picked HGST because of their reports. No problems so far. When you buy hard disks ONLY buy from Amazon or Newegg directly - never buy from a 3rd party seller on their site. Especially for hard disks there is too much fraud, and for a hard disk especially the risk of data loss makes it just too risky (unlike other items).
> When you buy hard disks ONLY buy from Amazon or Newegg directly - never buy from a 3rd party seller on their site. Agreed. A few times I've purchased third-party disks and found (via SMART data) that the drives were well used despite not being sold as such.
How are people using Backblaze's excellent hard drive reliability reports in making purchasing decisions? For example when I search for HGST HMS5C4040ALE640 on Amazon I get a dealer selling old out of warrantee drives as new. https://www.amazon.com/HGST-MegaScale-HMS5C4040ALE640-Coolsp... I get similar results with many of the other drives listed and with other websites such as NewEgg.
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From the outside it looks like your running a fairly intensive Wordpress install on an Apache webserver with no page caching. Also seems there's no minification or combining of stylesheets/js and there are query strings on those static assets which is going to discourage caching. No wonder you need a datacenter to handle that kind of resource punishment! There are plenty of reasons to stick with Wordpress in a decent…
Our web sys admin heard me read that out loud and now we have to get him an ice-pack because he almost shoved his head entirely through his desk.
Because if it is it from the team that currently can't keep a blog post online when you get a few thousand concurrent visitors, so you might keep yourself open to suggestions and perhaps undertake the BASIC best practices of keeping a Wordpress site up under load.
If nothing else it shows a basic lack of planning for what you know to be a massively popular post, so turn a little of that judgement back on yourselves.
It's possible easily handle tens of millions of hits a day on a tiny VPS if you do even some basics right[1] and that was without any particularly extensive optimisation.
[1] http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2014/06/25/40-million-hits-a-da...
EDIT: I may not be allowed to reply to the comment below due to HackerNews restrictions so incase the option doesn't become available in the next while I'll just say I accept the answer below gracefully, withdraw my daggers and take a calming beer at the end of a long day :-)
I'm wish you continued success and look forward to the next post.
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Our web sys admin heard me read that out loud and now we have to get him an ice-pack because he almost shoved his head entirely through his desk.
Is that meant as a rude retort? Because if it is it from the team that currently can't keep a blog post online when you get a few thousand concurrent visitors, so you might keep yourself open to suggestions and perhaps undertake the BASIC best practices of keeping a Wordpress site up under load. If nothing else it shows a basic lack of planning for what you know to be a massively popular post, so turn a little of tha…
*Edit -> to your above edit -> I think if you expand the comment by hitting the "time submitted" link you can leave a reply, thus subverting HN :P
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The Backblaze Vault design mitigates that as the "raid array" is scattered across 20 different Storage Pods in twenty different racks. You'd need more than three racks to go down before you would be offline. Backup systems in place make that highly unlikely. Andy at Backblaze.
I guess my question is more about the long term implications of transfer speeds increasing much slower than hard drives space. And if there's a hidden risk to downtime because all of a sudden, a full rack of 32 or even 64TB drive will take day(s) to transfer as opposed to an hour or so because transfer speeds are so slow.
