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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

#71

Post by siverson914 »

ShabbyDoo wrote: post #37

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 ch…

Check out Diomede Storage - it's a cloud storage service that allows you to specify the type of storage (Online, Nearline, Offline) for exactly this purpose. www.diomedestorage.com

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

#73

Post by jacquesm »

dlsspy wrote: post #70
onedognight wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> you'll replace it long before someone needs their backup How do you know when I'll need my backup?

Because you can access it from that other server that bb kept, and maybe even those two other servers if they're halfway smart.

Replication is what it is all about.

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

#74

Post by rythie »

uibuibk wrote: post #64
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…

Ironic though how Sun spent the last 20years trying to persuade companies that networks of Unix mini-computers were a cheap reliable alternative to mainframes - yet when it comes to putting disks in boxes you need to have everything stamped with the magic 'enterprise' badge. If you believed their spin presumably you would buy from a proper enterprise company like IBM or EDC - not some failed workstation vendor.

If you look at SANs in general, Sun undercuts that whole space, especially if you look at what they do with the 7000 series which combine SSDs and HDDs.

http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/

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

#75

Post by russss »

rbanffy wrote: post #67
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…

"how did so many people get the idea that this article about a specific solution to a specific problem was actually some sort of general purpose solution attacking all the big name people?" Backblaze did it, They did it when they decided to put this graph in the article: http://blog.backblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/cost-of... It's an apples to oranges comparison.

Well no, it's not an apples to oranges comparison because no hardware vendors offer a solution which is comparable to the one Backblaze have devised.

That graph is simply comparing their solution to the closest commercial equivalents. It just so happens that these are all way off because all hardware manufacturers want to design their hardware to provide the highest throughput.

(That said, our experience with the Sun X4500s hasn't been great from an I/O point of view.)

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

#76

Post by bbgm »

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.

At least a couple of pharma companies actively use Gluster. Haven't used it myself, but have heard some stories (not positive) about the stability

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

#77

Post by russss »

rythie wrote: post #74
uibuibk wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironic though how Sun spent the last 20years trying to persuade companies that networks of Unix mini-computers were a cheap reliable alternative to mainframes - yet when it comes to putting disks in boxes you need to have everything stamped with the magic 'enterprise' badge. If you believed their spin presumably you would buy from a proper enterprise company like IBM or EDC - not some failed workstation vendor.

If you look at SANs in general, Sun undercuts that whole space, especially if you look at what they do with the 7000 series which combine SSDs and HDDs. http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/

The 7000 series is an incredibly cool system, and it's definitely giving NetApp/EMC a run for their money.

That said, it's still really expensive if you're willing to go that extra mile and design your own system for your needs. And it's really not that hard.

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

#78

Post by blasdel »

ShabbyDoo wrote: post #37

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 ch…

Samsung's new generation of drives is currently only available in "EcoGreen" versions: 5400rpm. Doesn't particularly affect bandwidth when you're at 500gb/platter, though you lose on latency.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152...

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

#79

Post by rythie »

russss wrote: post #77
rythie wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at SANs in general, Sun undercuts that whole space, especially if you look at what they do with the 7000 series which combine SSDs and HDDs. http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/

The 7000 series is an incredibly cool system, and it's definitely giving NetApp/EMC a run for their money. That said, it's still really expensive if you're willing to go that extra mile and design your own system for your needs. And it's really not that hard.

Yeah I totally agree it's expensive - though compared to the other enterprise storage solutions it's cheap. That said people should be making cheaper solutions when you don't that enterprise level system - especially if you can handle the failures in your software stack.

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

#80

Post by Periodic »

russss wrote: post #75
rbanffy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"how did so many people get the idea that this article about a specific solution to a specific problem was actually some sort of general purpose solution attacking all the big name people?" Backblaze did it, They did it when they decided to put this graph in the article: http://blog.backblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/cost-of... It's an apples to oranges comparison.

Well no, it's not an apples to oranges comparison because no hardware vendors offer a solution which is comparable to the one Backblaze have devised. That graph is simply comparing their solution to the closest commercial equivalents. It just so happens that these are all way off because all hardware manufacturers want to design their hardware to provide the highest throughput. (That said, our experience with the Sun…

It is an apples to oranges comparison because Blackblaze is only including the cost of components in that graph for their solution, but they're including all of the research, development, assembly, and support costs in the other vendors' solutions.

What are the labor costs for testing all their hardware (with 10 sata controllers no less)? What are the labor costs for assembling all those systems? What is the labor costs of developing the system architecture? What are the labor costs of creating their storage application which reduces their need for in-box redundancy? And if you want to talk about Amazon there is data center rental, power, cooling, and ongoing administration.

In short, they're comparing the costs of their components to the costs of a ready-to-go solution from other vendors. Sounds like apples and oranges to me.

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