He also leaves out that you could buy 10 of these Backblaze things for the price of one Sun X4540. So with a distributed load, thats 10x the performance, 10x the reliability, etc... I'm not an expert on storage, but I'd be curious to see how that stacks up, never mind the comet-proof redundancy by placing your storage in datacenters across the world.
Sun engineer responds to the Backblaze "Petabytes on a budget" design
11–20 of 109 posts
Re: Sun engineer responds to the Backblaze "Petabytes on a budget" design
#12That's a pretty weird analysis, comparing a system that is special purpose with a general purpose one. He's concentrating on disk-to-board throughput, but this being network attached storage on a LAN, using the motherboards' single ethernet port the amount of data read or written to those drives per second will never exceed 1 Gbit/second anyway. I agree with the reliability analysis though, backblaze seems to be on f…
I think the can of worms is that Backblaze themselves compared their system to more general solutions. While they were doing that for their own purpose they weren't so explicit with that point that many people (such as GigaOM, etc) took it as a general comparison.
Re: Sun engineer responds to the Backblaze "Petabytes on a budget" design
#13Fascinating read, and its nice to see he brought up a lot of the concerns that were mentioned here. A few things that I noticed: He mentioned that 1 Disk uses 120 MB/s, so 5 of them is 600 MB/s. He then says that converts to 6 GB/s. Now, I'm not all that familiar with speeds, but I know 1000 MB is 1 GB, so shouldn't 600 MB/s be .6 GB/s? Other than that, he raised a number of valid points. The Backblaze system is NOT…
From the article:
"600 MByte/s, a little bit less than 6 GBit/s."
bytes vs bits.
Re: Sun engineer responds to the Backblaze "Petabytes on a budget" design
#14That's a pretty weird analysis, comparing a system that is special purpose with a general purpose one. He's concentrating on disk-to-board throughput, but this being network attached storage on a LAN, using the motherboards' single ethernet port the amount of data read or written to those drives per second will never exceed 1 Gbit/second anyway. I agree with the reliability analysis though, backblaze seems to be on f…
He did a good job explaining why one should shop around and weigh their options... Such that it works for backblaze but that doesn't mean it will work on other applications especially concerning power failure and vibrations. He did a very good job of objecting to there message professionally regarding its use for others.
Re: Sun engineer responds to the Backblaze "Petabytes on a budget" design
#15"It's the same with this storage, this hw needs the parachute in form of the software in front of the device."
Yes, software on (relatively) unreliable hardware is exactly how Google has been able to scale to such an immense scale.
Re: Sun engineer responds to the Backblaze "Petabytes on a budget" design
#16He also leaves out that you could buy 10 of these Backblaze things for the price of one Sun X4540. So with a distributed load, thats 10x the performance, 10x the reliability, etc... I'm not an expert on storage, but I'd be curious to see how that stacks up, never mind the comet-proof redundancy by placing your storage in datacenters across the world.
10x the rack space, 10x the cooling, 10x the power ...
Re: Sun engineer responds to the Backblaze "Petabytes on a budget" design
#17He also leaves out that you could buy 10 of these Backblaze things for the price of one Sun X4540. So with a distributed load, thats 10x the performance, 10x the reliability, etc... I'm not an expert on storage, but I'd be curious to see how that stacks up, never mind the comet-proof redundancy by placing your storage in datacenters across the world.
10x the rack space, 10x the cooling, 10x the power ...
Those costs are minor compared to the hardware solutions being discussed.
Re: Sun engineer responds to the Backblaze "Petabytes on a budget" design
#18He also leaves out that you could buy 10 of these Backblaze things for the price of one Sun X4540. So with a distributed load, thats 10x the performance, 10x the reliability, etc... I'm not an expert on storage, but I'd be curious to see how that stacks up, never mind the comet-proof redundancy by placing your storage in datacenters across the world.
10x the rack space, 10x the cooling, 10x the power ...
People often forget that the rack space, the actual physical space, is very costly. Depending on the datacenter, the power might run you just as much too. Last company I worked at was essentially forced out for using too much power per U.
Re: Sun engineer responds to the Backblaze "Petabytes on a budget" design
#19That's a pretty weird analysis, comparing a system that is special purpose with a general purpose one. He's concentrating on disk-to-board throughput, but this being network attached storage on a LAN, using the motherboards' single ethernet port the amount of data read or written to those drives per second will never exceed 1 Gbit/second anyway. I agree with the reliability analysis though, backblaze seems to be on f…
I think his 'DC-3' analogy is valid - BB has a decent system if you don't mind the risks, Sun is selling peace of mind.
Re: Sun engineer responds to the Backblaze "Petabytes on a budget" design
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
[deleted]
> Given the reliability info he cites, the fact that backblaze is still in business must mean their usage-to-storage ratio is small. No, it probably means that they get their reliability at a different level, such as simply storing the data on a number of machines. Systems like glusterfs make this completely transparant.
Gluster is broken. Hadoop is pretty proven, but I haven't heard of single, non-academic Gluster deployment that worked. From personal experience I can honestly say that software cost us several customers, and caused a support nightmare for a good month before we bought a SAN instead.