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Sun engineer responds to the Backblaze "Petabytes on a budget" design

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Re: Sun engineer responds to the Backblaze "Petabytes on a budget" design

#31

Post by anarcticpuffin »

I agree that what the article misses is that Backblaze is spending the money on software rather than hardware, since the price difference is so huge (and the software solution is a fixed cost).

What I'm more interested in is whether the lower MTBF of the cheap drives and home-brewed chassis ends up with a higher cost per year due to higher failure rates. If a desktop drive costs $100 and fails three times a year, but a server drive costs $200 and fails once every 2, the initial cost savings is moot.

Re: Sun engineer responds to the Backblaze "Petabytes on a budget" design

#32

Post by gaius »

mikeryan wrote: post #28
yangyang wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10x the rack space, 10x the cooling, 10x the power ...

Its not though. Both devices are 4U rack space servers. This actually sticks 67TB in one 4U rack the X4540 gets 48TB in 4U. This is less space rackpace per TB maybe more power. Even if you need two of these for redundancy the cost savings is significant.

What's that in Watts/U?

Re: Sun engineer responds to the Backblaze "Petabytes on a budget" design

#33

Post by onedognight »

jacquesm wrote: post #2

That'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…

Backblaze is making a backup server. They don't need to handle power supply failures. If one goes down, you'll replace it long before someone needs their backup. They don't need to worry about disks failing while writing (zfs and battery backup). Hell they can restart from scratch any one backup that encounters disk failures. They have all the time they want to do a backup.

Re: Sun engineer responds to the Backblaze "Petabytes on a budget" design

#35

Post by jacquesm »

abyssknight wrote: post #20
jacquesm wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Gluster is broken

Agreed, but I do know a few situations where it is being used, the 'stack' has been undressed to the minimum and tested to the hilt before deployment.

Still, I would not risk my company on it. I've been a big fan of their architecture from pretty much day 1, but so far they seem to be feature oriented and not stability oriented.

Re: Sun engineer responds to the Backblaze "Petabytes on a budget" design

#36

Post by barryrandall »

At first don't compare the mentioned list prices with the street prices for components.

This is why small companies, startups, and people new to the storage world hate working with storage vendors. I understand the economics, I get why they sell storage the way they do, and I like my 70% discount off list price, but it makes for a horrible user experience.

If I were a cleverer person, I'd apply an every-day low price model to "enterprise" storage.

Re: Sun engineer responds to the Backblaze "Petabytes on a budget" design

#37

Post by ShabbyDoo »

I used to work for a large consumer photo site, and we wished we could trade speed for lower cost or lower power consumption. Forget SCSI drives, SATA disks were 10x faster than what we needed for long-tail storage. If a photo became popular, we could cache it forward. The parato-ization of the photos was probably 99.9/0.1. I'm actually surprised that drive manufacturers haven't come out with a slower disk that is cheaper, lower power, and/or more reliable. We could find a zillion places to hide latency from our users.

Re: Sun engineer responds to the Backblaze "Petabytes on a budget" design

#38

Post by sp332 »

jacquesm wrote: post #26
sp332 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That's a pretty weird analysis, comparing a system that is special purpose with a general purpose one." I think that's why he says right at the beginning: This device is that cheap because it cuts several corners. That's okay for them. But for general purpose this creates problems. I want to share my concerns just to show you, that you can't compare this to a X4540 device.

And then he goes and does the comparison anyway...

No, he contrasts them :)

Re: Sun engineer responds to the Backblaze "Petabytes on a budget" design

#39

Post by sophacles »

gaius wrote: post #27
sophacles wrote: post #7

Ok I must be missing something. Everyone is knocking this backblaze thing because it doesnt do ZFS or because it is not a "super duper high end san replacement" or because the components are not rated for enterprise level work. It seems to me that a company whose product is personal and small business backups does not need any of those things. They have software to do mirroring. Why would they need any fast network f…

If "doing backups" is your business, then "look how cheap our kit is!" probably isn't the best marketing strategy. A "small business" is someone's bread-and-butter, they don't care that their backup needs aren't sexy to storage geeks.

I dunno, it made me consider them. Instead of "we spend $2m on storage, and someday to hope to make enough money from people like you to not go out of business", its "look we aren't charging you much, and we are promising you 50 yrs of storage, this is how we can actually do that and stay in business".

Re: Sun engineer responds to the Backblaze "Petabytes on a budget" design

#40

Post by akamaka »

jacquesm wrote: post #26
sp332 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That's a pretty weird analysis, comparing a system that is special purpose with a general purpose one." I think that's why he says right at the beginning: This device is that cheap because it cuts several corners. That's okay for them. But for general purpose this creates problems. I want to share my concerns just to show you, that you can't compare this to a X4540 device.

And then he goes and does the comparison anyway...

Let's not forget that BackBlaze started this, by making a graph that compared their prices to S3, etc. (and were also criticised for that in the previous HN thread).
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