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135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

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Re: 135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

#51

Post by SoftwareMaven »

cpt_yesterday wrote: post #22

FYI: Protocase ( http://www.protocase.com/ ), the company that will build you the Backblaze case, sent me an email yesterday announcing that they are now selling completed Backblase storage pods without the hard drives for $5395.00. I'm not sure if this is the new design or not but I've set up 3 of these and finding some of the parts (SATA back planes) took weeks of searching and shady dealings.

I'm considering putting a few of these together. Do you have any sources you'd mind sharing (preferably not shady :) for the harder-to-find parts?

Re: 135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

#52

Post by thaumaturgy »

zerosanity wrote: post #38
brianwski wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earlier we were totally interested in ZFS, as it would replace RAID & LVM as well (and ZFS gets great reviews). But (to my understanding) native ZFS is not available on Linux and we're not really looking to switch to OpenSolaris. ANOTHER option down this line of thinking is switching to btrfs, but we haven't played with it yet. By the way, at Backblaze I've felt like we have had to implement several things that I wou…

We're using FreeBSD's ZFS support and haven't had any hiccups to complain about.

We've had a backup server running for a client with FreeBSD's ZFS for about a year now, also with zero hiccups. We first tried to get this kind of stuff working about three or four years ago, and went the OpenSolaris/ZFS route -- what a pain that was. OpenSolaris somehow corrupted its own boot partition one day and just completely refused to start with a totally cryptic error code.

The last time we tried Linux for this, it couldn't do it. Maybe that's gotten better though.

We also tried DragonflyBSD, but it had hardware support issues, and OpenBSD, but unfortunately OpenBSD just simply cannot do large filesystems. At all.

ZFS-on-FreeBSD is the way to go at the moment, I think.

Re: 135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

#53

Post by ghshephard »

ghoul2 wrote: post #49

The blog post provides some fascinating data, thanks Backblaze! $2100 per month for an entire rack worth of Pods (space, power, connectivity) $74,000 is the cost to build 10 Pods to fill that rack. If the Pods are assumed to have a lifetime of 3 years (most will last longer, but lets depreciate at this rate), and if the cost of capital is 20%/year, this equates to a monthly "payment/amortization" cost of $2750. Thus…

I pay Amazon.com $100/year for 100 Gigabytes, or $8.33/month for 100 gigabytes, or $0.083/month/gigabyte. No transfer charges.

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=iro...

Re: 135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

#54

Post by eropple »

brianwski wrote: post #44
wmf wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I'd eliminate the boot drive and PXE boot.

We're considering a PXE boot solution (among other solutions) just to keep all 200 pods (and growing!) updated to the latest Debian. But we also use the boot drive for a few other things like error logging and such. But the idea of eliminating the boot drive entirely is not a bad idea, we could drop the logs in a folder at the top of the data drives. We already (selectively) mirror various excerpts of the logs to oth…

Perhaps streaming logs would help you out? My employer dumps a preposterous amount of log data constantly via streaming log systems (we use log4j, but there are solutions for syslogs, etc.). Aside from a few early hiccups, it works pretty well.

Re: 135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

#55

Post by RShackleford »

jbooth wrote: post #25
brianwski wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the RAM is ECC. Here is a link: http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?imodule=CT25672B... The ECC RAM absolutely does find and corrects problems (we see them in the logs). However, just to be absolutely clear we would not need ECC RAM -> Backblaze checksums EVERYTHING on an end-to-end basis (mostly we use SHA-1). This is so important I cannot stress this highly enough, each and every file and portion of fi…

Huh, didn't know there was an i3 that supported ECC. Cool.

Curious, according to Intel, it the i3 doesn't do ECC: http://www.intel.com/support/processors/corei3/sb/CS-031175....

But the Supermicro board says it can: http://www.supermicro.com/xeon_3400/Motherboard/X8SIL.cfm

The board also supports Xeon processors, so it might be that it only supports ECC with Xeon. However, I didn't see anything in the docs to support this, instead it says "Dual Core processors of Ci3 and Pentium: support ECC UDIMM only"

I'm curious since I ended up springing for Xeon in my system specifically for ECC. Now I'm wondering if I made a mistake...

Re: 135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

#56

Post by vegardx »

brianwski wrote: post #14
alfet wrote: post #7

Does anyone know if Backblaze will ever support Linux? I've wanted to use their service for a while now, but their lack of Linux support has being a big turn down, and I don't think they have made any change in their statements regarding this 'issue'.

We would like to, we just haven't had time to get it done yet. It runs internally, but is lacking an installer and a GUI, and we would need to prioritize and choose one or more Linux distributions to launch with. Ubuntu is an obvious choice (we focus more on desktop backup than on servers). But some people also ask for CentOS and a few others. It bums me out the Linux community has not solved binary compatibility any…

If you provided a good solution for taking backups on Linux-system my guess is that you would get a lot of customers like me. If I could easily apt-get some binaries, setup what folders should be backed up and run backups every X-hour it would be a killer feature. Right now I manage a ton of rdiff-scripts to backup to all my files to remote locations.

Re: 135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

#57

Post by ghoul2 »

ghshephard wrote: post #53
ghoul2 wrote: post #49

The blog post provides some fascinating data, thanks Backblaze! $2100 per month for an entire rack worth of Pods (space, power, connectivity) $74,000 is the cost to build 10 Pods to fill that rack. If the Pods are assumed to have a lifetime of 3 years (most will last longer, but lets depreciate at this rate), and if the cost of capital is 20%/year, this equates to a monthly "payment/amortization" cost of $2750. Thus…

I pay Amazon.com $100/year for 100 Gigabytes, or $8.33/month for 100 gigabytes, or $0.083/month/gigabyte. No transfer charges. http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=iro...

True. Though thats not a generic storage service in the sense of S3 or Google Storage. Some also think its a "trojan" to detect pirated media :-)

On that note: I could not find any real detail about this - do they encrypt your files? what kind of privacy/security do they promise? I am assuming the media files do get de-duped across all users, but what about other, personal docs, spreadsheets, pdf etc?

Re: 135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

#58

Post by ghshephard »

ghoul2 wrote: post #57
ghshephard wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay Amazon.com $100/year for 100 Gigabytes, or $8.33/month for 100 gigabytes, or $0.083/month/gigabyte. No transfer charges. http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=iro...

True. Though thats not a generic storage service in the sense of S3 or Google Storage. Some also think its a "trojan" to detect pirated media :-) On that note: I could not find any real detail about this - do they encrypt your files? what kind of privacy/security do they promise? I am assuming the media files do get de-duped across all users, but what about other, personal docs, spreadsheets, pdf etc?

I actually haven't found any restrictions on what I can store - I've just been tossing stuff up like crazy.

Tools like: http://lifehacker.com/5788550/mount-your-amazon-cloud-drive-... will let you mount the drive in windows - I have to believe it will only be a little while before Amazon lets me mount this drive with a utility they provide.

Re: 135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

#59

Post by mrb »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #48
mrb wrote: post #2

Direct link to Backblaze's blog post: http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v... They got rid of the PCI bottleneck by switching to PCIe, a bottleneck which surprised me when they designed version 1.0 of their pod. They could have gone PCIe at the time, I maintain http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=10 and they were SATA controllers at the time that met their technical requirements (nr. of ports, Linux su…

According to the post above, they were using three PCIe and one PCI. "In the first generation storage pod, we ran out of the faster PCIe slots and had to use one slower PCI slot, creating a bottleneck."

I know. I meant to say they could have managed without using that PCI slot at the time (ie. using only 3 PCIe SATA HBAs, or using a mobo with 4 PCIe slots).

Re: 135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

#60

Post by stcredzero »

SystemOut wrote: post #20
kylec wrote: post #16

Backblaze should really consider selling their pods - it would basically free money for them because whatever inventory they don't sell they can use for their service, and I'm sure there's lots of businesses that would pay good money for a cheaper alternative to storage servers from Dell or HP.

It'd be a major distraction, though. Setting up a separate support/services organization for that is not trivial. Also, most businesses buy from the Dells or the HPs because they don't have the in-house expertise to manage a more bare-bones box (or more likely just don't want to). The companies that have the need/capability to manage more raw storage could just take the plans and build them out anyways I would imagin…

Sounds like there's a niche and a partnership opportunity. They certainly have enough mindshare to consider this.
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