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Any idea what Dell is actually selling them? The DVR's we buy (Avigilon) are white Dell 7x0's with a custom white bezel, but those only fit 18 3.5" drives.
So did they do something custom (unlikely at this volume) or did Backblaze change their hardware approach?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd think they could build a ARM-powered, credit card sized controller for them with a disk breakout card and network IO. PC motherboard and full-sized cards seem like overkill.
They're running a fair bit of math (probably Reed Solomon matrix multiplications for error correction) over all the data accesses. Given the bandwidth of 60+ hard drives (150MB/s per hard drive x 60 == 9GB/s in/out), I'm pretty sure you need a decent CPU just to handle the PCIe traffic. At least PCIe 3.0 x16, just for the hard drives. And then another x16 for network connections (multiple PHY for Fiber in/out that ca…
Given their scale and goal, it would be pretty wasteful to build it to max the writing speed of all hard drives. Considering you rarely write on the pod, you would be better of getting a fraction of that speed and writing on multiple pods at the same time to get the required peak performance.
In fact actually that makes much more sense to put that math on some ingests server and theses hard drive servers would simply write the resulting data. It makes it much easier and faster to divide it over 20 pods like they currently do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're running a fair bit of math (probably Reed Solomon matrix multiplications for error correction) over all the data accesses. Given the bandwidth of 60+ hard drives (150MB/s per hard drive x 60 == 9GB/s in/out), I'm pretty sure you need a decent CPU just to handle the PCIe traffic. At least PCIe 3.0 x16, just for the hard drives. And then another x16 for network connections (multiple PHY for Fiber in/out that ca…
> Given the bandwidth of 60+ hard drives (150MB/s per hard drive x 60 == 9GB/s in/out) Given their scale and goal, it would be pretty wasteful to build it to max the writing speed of all hard drives. Considering you rarely write on the pod, you would be better of getting a fraction of that speed and writing on multiple pods at the same time to get the required peak performance. In fact actually that makes much more s…
Always cool to get insights into the business and technical challenges at Backblaze!
Any idea what Dell is actually selling them? The DVR's we buy (Avigilon) are white Dell 7x0's with a custom white bezel, but those only fit 18 3.5" drives.
Could be the MD3060e with an R650 server? https://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/shared-content/data-shee...
Did the surge in Chia mining affect global hard drive prices at all?
Any idea what Dell is actually selling them? The DVR's we buy (Avigilon) are white Dell 7x0's with a custom white bezel, but those only fit 18 3.5" drives.
I’d love to know this as well. Dell doesn’t have anything remotely close to what Backblaze was designing/building themselves. So did they do something custom (unlikely at this volume) or did Backblaze change their hardware approach?
It's their PowerEdge MX platform, which allows you to slot in different "sleds" for storage/compute etc. as needed. It can take 7 storage sleds for a total of 112 drivers per chasis.
I'm curious what is being used for the drives (and to a lesser extent, memory) - Dell or OEM and how does support work? We sell a lot of Dell and for base models, it is very economical compared to self built. The moment however we add a few high capacity hard drives or memory, all bets are off the table and it's usually 1.75-4x the price of a white box part. I get not supporting the part itself, but, had them not sup…
Backblaze has usually sourced their own hard drives, and I suspect they still are/will. (The post didn't seem to indicate otherwise.) Every year they post a summary of what models they're working with and how they perform, which is usually good reading. This is last year's: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-fo... .
That appeared to depend on whether the vendor imposed massive markups on the drives. However they also mentioned service etc.: If they struck a deal with Dell, then Dell might be perfectly happy to sell the servers at a very modest profit while making their money on the service agreement.
I'm surprised Dell don't make they buy hard drives from them at a substantial mark-up, as they allude to vendors doing earlier in the story.
Any idea what Dell is actually selling them? The DVR's we buy (Avigilon) are white Dell 7x0's with a custom white bezel, but those only fit 18 3.5" drives.