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Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

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Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#41

Post by 7b64f0f2 »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #34

I’ve been a customer for years and recently had a catastrophic failure of a computer and it’s direct attached backup drive. I have spent the last four days waiting for backblaze to create a restore a backup for a computer on and last I checked it was at 9%. I chatted with support and they said this is normal. That progress may jump to completed any time because the restore only tracks file count. I wish I could say I…

Makes me wonder how much data/files you are trying to get back from their storage.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#42

Post by rtpg »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #34

I’ve been a customer for years and recently had a catastrophic failure of a computer and it’s direct attached backup drive. I have spent the last four days waiting for backblaze to create a restore a backup for a computer on and last I checked it was at 9%. I chatted with support and they said this is normal. That progress may jump to completed any time because the restore only tracks file count. I wish I could say I…

I had a similar thing happen to me, what I did was pick the files I wanted immediately and got a zip file with those within... 30 minutes? Then got more of the files later

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#43

Post by dspillett »

linsomniac wrote: post #32

I've watched Backblaze closely, and I love their detailed reports of drive stats. I've always been curious about their choices of manufacturers though. In my past I found that Hitachi/HGST drives were far more reliable than others. We had a couple people doing hardware and software support on ~120 machines, and hard drive replacements were expensive (in man-hours) for us, so whenever possible we got Hitachi drives. T…

They don't buy direct from manufacturers so it might be partly down to availability numbers from their local distributors.

Also you want to buy from a wide range - if most of the drives come from one place and they have a manufacturing disaster that causes everything made in one month to fail a few months into use then that might take you too close to redundancy requirements for comfort. I would expect the range picked will be based on individual design (platter design, platter layout, controller type, ...) rather than per manufacturer - maybe HGST has fewer designs available at any one time and that tips the balance a bit.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#44

Post by plantain »

teach wrote: post #37
xhrpost wrote: post #27

I imagine you'll have to reduce pricing on Backblaze B2 eventually in order to stay competitive. What's it like having to flip such a massive switch where your revenue is X one minute and then X - 20% the next?

I don't understand. B2 is currently about half the cost of S3 for outbound data and 1/4 the cost for data at rest. What do you mean "stay competitive?"

They're not equivalent. B2 is singly homed.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#45

Post by finnh »

7b64f0f2 wrote: post #41
godzillabrennus wrote: post #34

I’ve been a customer for years and recently had a catastrophic failure of a computer and it’s direct attached backup drive. I have spent the last four days waiting for backblaze to create a restore a backup for a computer on and last I checked it was at 9%. I chatted with support and they said this is normal. That progress may jump to completed any time because the restore only tracks file count. I wish I could say I…

Makes me wonder how much data/files you are trying to get back from their storage.

Then why not ask?

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#46

Post by ac29 »

corobo wrote: post #31
atYevP wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey there! The business and consumer computer backup service have the same feature-set, so our business service would also not work with a NAS or Linux box. I'd recommend looking in to Backblaze B2. It'll be a bit more expensive as it's $0.005/GB but you'll have more control over your backups and lots of integrators make it easy.

Is Linux backup support anywhere on the radar at all? I recently trimmed down my Backblaze licenses after switching to Linux installs, just went with s3 as s3cmd had a path of least resistance to storing backups. Would love to switch back if it's ever possible :)

Theyve repeatedly said no -- it breaks their business model to allow Linux machines (often servers) to backup "unlimited" data for $5/month. People with multi-hundred TB NAS machines would end that business model, quickly (see Amazon Cloud Drive, Crashplan, and others).

But if youre using S3, just switch to B2, its per GB pricing, much cheaper than S3 and supports lots of Linux tools. I use rclone.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#47

Post by atYevP »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #34

I’ve been a customer for years and recently had a catastrophic failure of a computer and it’s direct attached backup drive. I have spent the last four days waiting for backblaze to create a restore a backup for a computer on and last I checked it was at 9%. I chatted with support and they said this is normal. That progress may jump to completed any time because the restore only tracks file count. I wish I could say I…

Yev from Backblaze here -> That's definitely not normal, how much data/files do you have (are you doing a .zip or a USB restore)? We're currently QAing a dramatic increase to the restores, but right now only available internally until we are confident in it. In the mean time though you can download mission-critical files in smaller-sized restored, that might help you get up and running faster while the mega-restore completes.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#48

Post by NikolaeVarius »

amelius wrote: post #39
atYevP wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yev from Backblaze here -> Yes, unless the storage pod is in maintenance, it remains on so that backup and B2 data can be uploaded and accessed.

Interesting. Have you ever computed how much power you would save if you turned them off when not needed? Or is every pod constantly in use? Would it help if smart algorithms repartition the data on storage pods, to optimize power use?

Why wouldn't that be handled already by the drives themselves?

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#49

Post by ac29 »

ksec wrote: post #35
chiph wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've talked about this before -- despite orders like this, they're still not a big enough customer to be on the manufacturer's radar. So they're ordering from a middle-man. Back during the hard-drive crisis after the tidal wave that disrupted production ... they were buying from anyone that had drives to sell, including people going into their local big-box store to source drives.

Still? 100PB of HDD is still not big Enough? So the question would be, In unit of Backblaze, what are the size for Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook?

Curious on that too. I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon needs 10,000 drives a day (many of which are probably going to replace dead drives, or upgrade lower capacity ones). Google is probably about the same.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#50

Post by x4d66a5ce »

amelius wrote: post #39
atYevP wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yev from Backblaze here -> Yes, unless the storage pod is in maintenance, it remains on so that backup and B2 data can be uploaded and accessed.

Interesting. Have you ever computed how much power you would save if you turned them off when not needed? Or is every pod constantly in use? Would it help if smart algorithms repartition the data on storage pods, to optimize power use?

I wonder about this, too. Since access latency is the primary concern, a neat solution would be to create some dynamic "fastup" storage scheme. For large files, loosen the always-on requirement; to fulfill a request the first N bytes are served from the always-on pod, and the tail is stored and served from pods that dynamically power up drives only at access time. The size of N is computed such that the IO time it takes to make it through the fragment stored on the always-on pod is > the power-on time for the pods where the tail is stored.
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