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The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

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Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#101

Post by midasuni »

briffle wrote: post #24
walrus01 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3U and 4U x86 whitebox servers designed for any standard 12"x13" motherboard, where the entire front panel was hotswap 3.5" HDD bays were already a thing many, many years before backblaze existed. What wasn't really a thing was servers with hotswap HDD trays on both ends (like the supermicros) and things that were designed with vertical hard drives dropped down from a top-opening lid to achieve even higher density.

The Sun X4500 "thumper" server had 48 drives, if I remember correctly, and came out in 2006ish. It had hot-swap SATA disks (up to 512GB disks initially!) and was actually pretty cool and forward thinking https://web.archive.org/web/20061128164442/http://www.sun.co...

Bought three with 1TB drives and ZFS. Wasn’t cheap.

Hardware was great, but no linux/zfs support meant we didn’t stick with it.

A couple of years later we had standardised on supermicros with a similar density and ran linux on them.

Sun lost a fair amount of money from us (7 figures) by choosing not to embrace linux.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#102

Post by chx »

adityapatadia wrote: post #99
deskamess wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even for streaming of video files? I thought you had to use Cloudflares other product for that.

We tried to use B2 for storing image and video files. First byte out is very slow (as expected). We however experienced bigger issues where if you try to upload millions of files per minute in their system, it crumbles. Huge amount of errors were thrown and their support could not help. We decided to stick with king of storage AWS S3.

> if you try to upload millions of files per minute

may I suggest this might not be a typical usecase?

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#103

Post by chx »

deskamess wrote: post #95
chx wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the Big Deal is Backblaze B2. Especially when fronted by Cloudflare -- zero traffic costs. Storage is cheap as far as cloud storage provider goes and traffic is decidedly the cheapest possible.

Even for streaming of video files? I thought you had to use Cloudflares other product for that.

Please read https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/m0gtmf/backblaze... especially https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/m0gtmf/backblaze...

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#104

Post by aidenn0 »

chx wrote: post #82
wrikl wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author recently commented: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/next-backblaze-storage-pod/#c... It's apparently the "Dell PowerEdge R740xd2 rack server".

https://ifworlddesignguide.com/entry/281015-poweredge-r740xd... super interesting design.

That looks like 13 drives per U (26 in 2U); weren't the BB pods 15 drives per U (60 in 4U)?

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#105

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

Backblaze, if you’re reading this…

I used to work in a data centre doing infrastructure; I’m a metal fabricator by trade and now run and operate a laser cutter full time; I’ve done plenty of industrial spray painting; and heaps of press operating; plenty of CAD / CAM experience.

With trainee under me, I could have built these for you in-house and been useful the rest of the month when fabrication and painting etc was done.

That would have been fun!

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#107

Post by jpgvm »

Aeolun wrote: post #87

May just be me, but I feel like it’s probably a bad idea to outsource one of your core competencies. Backblaze is quite literally built on their storage pods. It’s like outsourcing the EU telecommunications, which we’ve seen a bunch of articles about recently.

Boxes full of disks used to be special, in a past time there was only the glorious Thumper. BB pods and hyperscaler servers built by Quanta and Supermicro have pushed "boxes full or disks" into race to the bottom territory.

Software is now the only thing that separates services like BB, Dropbox, et al.

Don't cry for BB pods, they did their job and now you can get a higher quality chassis at a similar cost basis from Dell as a result.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#108

Post by baybal2 »

dragontamer wrote: post #29
bluedino wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think they could build a ARM-powered, credit card sized controller for them with a disk breakout card and network IO. PC motherboard and full-sized cards seem like overkill.

They're running a fair bit of math (probably Reed Solomon matrix multiplications for error correction) over all the data accesses. Given the bandwidth of 60+ hard drives (150MB/s per hard drive x 60 == 9GB/s in/out), I'm pretty sure you need a decent CPU just to handle the PCIe traffic. At least PCIe 3.0 x16, just for the hard drives. And then another x16 for network connections (multiple PHY for Fiber in/out that ca…

They already have a RAID card doing it for them

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#109

Post by adityapatadia »

chx wrote: post #102
adityapatadia wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tried to use B2 for storing image and video files. First byte out is very slow (as expected). We however experienced bigger issues where if you try to upload millions of files per minute in their system, it crumbles. Huge amount of errors were thrown and their support could not help. We decided to stick with king of storage AWS S3.

> if you try to upload millions of files per minute may I suggest this might not be a typical usecase?

Yeah, :D But when someone hands over a storage system, temptation is high to store everything on it.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#110

Post by VOSgqcSyGdPhGWP »

josefresco wrote: post #26
richwater wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chia is a literal scam. There's a massive amount of premined chia controlled by the "chia strategic reserve". It will take a decade for the amount of mined value to equal the pre-mined value.

I looked into Chia mining as a hobby and was directed to Burstcoin. I don't know much about either, but Burstcoin advocates claim it's the "better" PoC. Note: I went to double check something on the Burstcoin website and realized today, June 24th they changed their name to Signum - https://www.burst-coin.org/

Why not do something useful with the space like FileCoin or Arweave?
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