21–30 of 106 posts
I didn't see anything in here that discusses that eventuality? And when you have that many servers, it IS going to happen at some point...
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)
For example each of these "pods" only has 4GB of RAM. If I was doing lots of random I/O on 67TB of drives, I would want a heck of a lot more ram for caching efficiencies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Backblaze $117,000 [...] Amazon $2,806,000 I cry foul. Backblaze's "67 TB" pods actually only hold 58.5 TB, so their hardware cost per PB of storage is $134k, not $117k; and that's without any high-level redundancy. Servers fail -- both catastrophically, and by silently corrupting bits -- and Backblaze's $134k / PB doesn't have any protection against that. Datacenters also fail -- power outages, cut fibre, FBI raids,…
Interesting, but Amazon doesn't guarantee most of those things. They guarantee a 99.99% uptime, but that isn't counting a complete datacenter failure. In fact, it sounds to me as if they have a similar set up to the backblaze people. 99.99% uptime means roughly 1 hour per year of downtime. I don't know what the specific failure rates on the components are, but it seems reasonable that A) the data drives are hot-swapp…
I believe that S3 replicates to multiple physical locations. So, while you might experience downtime, you probably won't experience data loss.
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)
Apparently they use HTTPS for input/output using tomcat and some custom application. That's a strange choice, HTTPS would incur quite a bit of overhead for something that is essentially a (large) drive at the end of a network cable used internally only. Why the encryption ? quote from the article: "A Backblaze Storage Pod isn’t a complete building block until it boots and is on the network. The pods boot 64-bit Debia…
What happens when one of the PSU's fails catastrophically, pushing a big electrical surge through the hard disks, frying half of them? I didn't see anything in here that discusses that eventuality? And when you have that many servers, it IS going to happen at some point...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Backblaze $117,000 [...] Amazon $2,806,000 I cry foul. Backblaze's "67 TB" pods actually only hold 58.5 TB, so their hardware cost per PB of storage is $134k, not $117k; and that's without any high-level redundancy. Servers fail -- both catastrophically, and by silently corrupting bits -- and Backblaze's $134k / PB doesn't have any protection against that. Datacenters also fail -- power outages, cut fibre, FBI raids,…
Interesting, but Amazon doesn't guarantee most of those things. They guarantee a 99.99% uptime, but that isn't counting a complete datacenter failure. In fact, it sounds to me as if they have a similar set up to the backblaze people. 99.99% uptime means roughly 1 hour per year of downtime. I don't know what the specific failure rates on the components are, but it seems reasonable that A) the data drives are hot-swapp…
"Amazon keeps at least 3 copies of your data (which is what you need for high reliability) in at least 2 different geographical locations. "
I can't find the original source supporting that statement, but I also know it to be true based on direct contact with AWS team. (I'm using AWS since private alpha of EC2 in 2005)
What happens when one of the PSU's fails catastrophically, pushing a big electrical surge through the hard disks, frying half of them? I didn't see anything in here that discusses that eventuality? And when you have that many servers, it IS going to happen at some point...
From the article:
When you run a datacenter with thousands of hard drives, CPUs, motherboards, and power supplies, you are going to have hardware failures it’s irrefutable. Backblaze Storage Pods are building blocks upon which a larger system can be organized that doesn’t allow for a single point of failure.
Does somebody know any other company which provides this solution? I don't trust other people to crawl my system and to "encrypt" it for me.
EDIT: Added Question