How do you replace a drive? With so many drives it seems like a lot of effort to pull the entire server out to just access one drive.
Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage
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Re: Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage
#32I 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.
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,…
It might not add up the same for your needs (assuming you want multi-data center redundancy of all data, etc...).
Re: Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage
#33What 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...
It's addressed in the section "A Backblaze Storage Pod is a Building Block" 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.
Re: Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage
#34They 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
#35This 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 t…
I think you missed the part about testing a dozen SATA cards, etc.
The attention to detail here is a lot more than something you'd slap together in your apartment.
Re: Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage
#36What a pity, I'd like to have a way to store just a encrypted backup directly (via ssh) instead of installing a app which crawls my system. Oh did I mention I use Linux? sign 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
Re: Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage
#37What a pity, I'd like to have a way to store just a encrypted backup directly (via ssh) instead of installing a app which crawls my system. Oh did I mention I use Linux? sign 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
Re: Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage
#38Wow. 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)
Of course these days there are well-understood solutions to those problems, compared to when S3 first started, but it's still not stuff you can pull off the shelf. (Although with the Cassandra distributed database, the metadata problem is close to that point now. )
Re: Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
> While technology isn't more than any typical hacker can slap together in their apartment I think you missed the part about testing a dozen SATA cards, etc. The attention to detail here is a lot more than something you'd slap together in your apartment.
Re: Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage
#40This 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 t…