Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage

#1

Post by bensummers » Tue, Sep 01, 2009, 1:51 PM UTC

Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage
blog.backblaze.com

Re: Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage

#2

Post by dmillar » Tue, Sep 01, 2009, 2:38 PM UTC

This is unbelievably awesome. Can you imagine what we could achieve if every company had this level of transparency?

Re: Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage

#3

Post by edw519 » Tue, Sep 01, 2009, 2:49 PM UTC

I always thought it was best to focus on what I did best (application software) and leave the infostructure to others. Until I saw this:

  Raw Drives      $81,000
  Backblaze      $117,000
  Dell           $826,000
  Sun          $1,000,000
  NetApp       $1,714,000
  Amazon       $2,806,000
  EMC          $2,860,000

I had no idea. Kinda makes one rethink what business they want to be in.

Re: Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage

#4

Post by modoc » Tue, Sep 01, 2009, 2:49 PM UTC

I love how open they are about their solution, and I also want one for Christmas:)

Re: Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage

#5

Post by psranga » Tue, Sep 01, 2009, 2:57 PM UTC

Great stuff. Would anybody care to clarify why access is through HTTPS and not HTTP?

I presume all accesses to these pods are from within their data center? Or do they directly expose these boxes to clients (whoa!)?

Re: Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage

#6

Post by spydez » Tue, Sep 01, 2009, 3:01 PM UTC

edw519 wrote: post #3

I always thought it was best to focus on what I did best (application software) and leave the infostructure to others. Until I saw this: Raw Drives $81,000 Backblaze $117,000 Dell $826,000 Sun $1,000,000 NetApp $1,714,000 Amazon $2,806,000 EMC $2,860,000 I had no idea. Kinda makes one rethink what business they want to be in.

Well, to be fair, Backblaze is using consumer-grade hardware here. No redundant PSUs. No mirrored OS drives. Cheaper components. Etc.

They're going Google's route, which is fine, it's just... a whole different direction than a Sun Thumper. I'd be interested to see how their costs per petabyte stack against Google's.

Re: Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage

#7

Post by tsuraan » Tue, Sep 01, 2009, 3:02 PM UTC

67TB of storage, with 4GB of cache. I'd really love to see some performance numbers versus the way-too-expensive competition. If the systems are being used as tape drive replacements, I could see this working well, but as an actual NAS-like device, I can't imaging how it could perform acceptably. Of course, if those Intel motherboards have the dual 1Gb/s NICs that Intel boards generally do, it will probably take a while to fill the drives anyhow.

Re: Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage

#8

Post by PStamatiou » Tue, Sep 01, 2009, 3:03 PM UTC

dmillar wrote: post #2

This is unbelievably awesome. Can you imagine what we could achieve if every company had this level of transparency?

Thinking the exact same thing! While technology isn't more than any typical hacker can slap together in their apartment (minus maybe the case fab), I think the application is ingenious and the full blog post about it, like dmillar, pointed out is rather awe-inspiring. And I was all happy because my new Core i7 box has 2TB of space and 6GB of ram... sigh

That being said - did seagate ever fix their firmware issue on the 1.5TB drives that would cause random corruption? (heard about it maybe 6 months ago)

Re: Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage

#9

Post by gstar » Tue, Sep 01, 2009, 3:07 PM UTC

They might have missed a trick here.

To address vibration, acoustics and gyroscopic effect, what I've seen done in highly dense enclosures is to rotate every second drive around 180 degrees in a bit of a shotgun approach to balancing stuff.

Still, awesome.

Re: Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage

#10

Post by swombat » Tue, Sep 01, 2009, 3:09 PM UTC

Wow.

Do they offer S3-like storage? They should. If they can offer something like S3, but at one third of a penny per gigabyte per month (heck, let's splash out - a whole penny per gigabyte per month) I know quite a few people who'll be interested in talking to them... (including myself)