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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

#101

Post by ciupicri »

mmt wrote: post #99
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer to your question is in the price comparisons that Backblaze provides. If you compare the price of something you imply that it fills the same or similar needs. Since there is no explicit caveat, and they don't explain why their solution is so much cheaper, competitors will come out and provide that explanation for them. I'm pretty sure that the Backblaze solution is actually cheaper and that they are cuttin…

desktop grade hard disks I believe the data dispel this marketing myth. http://usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_htm... http://usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/full_papers/pinheiro/pi...

Interesting papers, but based on what I've skimmed and remember I don't think that they compare desktop grade disks with server grade disks.

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

#102

Post by duskwuff »

sho wrote: post #90
anigbrowl wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ask Joyent about the "peace of mind" they got from their Thumper ...

Ref: http://www.joyent.com/joyeurblog/2008/01/16/strongspace-and-...

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

#103

Post by duskwuff »

rbanffy wrote: post #68
notaddicted wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

( ahhh I deleted my post before I saw the response ) From the numbers he cited I got the impression that the drives they are using would fail 3+ times more often than enterprise drives (lower MTTF + speced at low temps). The cost of replacing the drives (even if they are 1/2 the price) would make the system uneconomical. Also: because of their case design (non-hot-swappable) the cost of human replacement is higher to…

Given proper redundancy and a adequately read/write unbalance, it's safe to power-down drives during read-heavy cycles and only power them up when you have some redundant data to write. But you will have to manage the cycles for redundancy, lifetime and power savings. The software to do it must be really clever.

Or even to power down the entire pod if the data on it is quiescent. If you managed the fill and aging properly, this wouldn't even be hard to do -- as a backup service, they're write-heavy, which gives them a lot of flexibility that other applications don't have.

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

#104

Post by thegoleffect »

docmach wrote: post #83
thegoleffect wrote: post #72

Seems like he's just making it easier for Backblaze to match feature to feature by listing out the differences O_o.

I'm pretty sure Sun isn't worried about Backblaze as competition in the enterprise storage market. Building cheap storage boxes is much different than building what Sun provides.

That's usually how disruptive technologies start out though; the fact that Sun doesn't care makes Backblaze that more dangerous.

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

#105

Post by ZachPruckowski »

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.

OK, so it's less rackspace per TB. But it's still more power, and more cooling. And in terms of filling a rack, power and/or cooling become limiting factors long before volume does.

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

#106

Post by jrg »

kdw wrote: post #84
c00p3r wrote: post #57

zfs with OpenSolaris is a good tip. 2009.06 is a much less mess (leave alone that we-will-rewrite-everything-in-java svc:/* horror)

zfs performance in 2009.06 has some very serious problems, particularly with zvols.

Do you have references and pointers? Is this going to hurt me when I put two non-storage servers live running 2009.06?

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

#107

Post by kdw »

jrg wrote: post #106
kdw wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

zfs performance in 2009.06 has some very serious problems, particularly with zvols.

Do you have references and pointers? Is this going to hurt me when I put two non-storage servers live running 2009.06?

You can find a number of them on the opensolaris forums if you search on terms like 0906 iscsi, comstar 0906, etc... here's an example: http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=104593&...

Our experience was that 0906 was utterly unusable if you're using comstar, with performance being mildly degraded for straight zfs usage.

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

#108

Post by easp »

Periodic wrote: post #80
russss wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

They did invite these criticisms by drawing comparisons to S3, EMC, etc. However, they already tried to factor out the cost of operations so that s3 was on equal footing with the non-service offerings. We can quibble about the specific numbers they used, but I think the bigger quibble is that by their own estimates, those costs are substantial, seemingly far outstripping their hardware costs by something like an order of magnitude. Even so, at the scale of a pentabyte or more, the savings are substantial enough to be worth addressing.

As for the missing costs that you cite, think this through. What do you really think the per-unit costs for assembly and testing are? Even if each unit required a couple of man-days, the costs would probably only add ~10% or so per unit. The other costs you cite for the initial hardware and software engineering are fixed costs, the same whether they are storing 1PB or 1,000. Also, if they did their job right, much of the per-unit testing cost should be mitigated by the overall systems design. The system management automation can do a test cycle on new nodes before promoting them to production use, and of course, failures should be dealt with automatically.

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

#109

Post by mmt »

ciupicri wrote: post #101
mmt wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

desktop grade hard disks I believe the data dispel this marketing myth. http://usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_htm... http://usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/full_papers/pinheiro/pi...

Interesting papers, but based on what I've skimmed and remember I don't think that they compare desktop grade disks with server grade disks.

Given the length of history, they do, in effect, by comparing disks with server-grade interfaces (e.g. SCSI) with desktop-grade interfaces (e.g. IDE).
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