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The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

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Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#21

Post by ev1 »

sliken wrote: post #18
foodstances wrote: post #16

Did the surge in Chia mining affect global hard drive prices at all?

I've been watching drive prices, it's hard to say exactly why, but around mid April disk prices at Newegg and amazon jumped significantly. One drive that had been $300, jumped to $400, $500, and even spiked to $800 for a bit. By Jun 1st had dropped to $550, and only this week has dropped for $400. Still above the original $300, but at least a not terribly painful premium.

Chia mining-before-transactions-are-released -> Chia transactions released -> Chia price at a high price -> Chia price halves shortly after, turns out virtually impossible for US users to get on any of the exchanges handling XCH

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#22

Post by dragontamer »

I have to imagine that by making Storage Pods 1.0 through 6.0, maybe they "encouraged" Dell (and other manufacturers) that this particular 60+ hard drive server was a good idea.

And now that multiple "storage pod-like" systems exist in the marketplace (not just Dell, but also Supermicro) selling 60-bay or 90-bay 3.5" Hard drive storage servers in 4U rack form factors, there's not much reason to build their own?

At least, that's my assumption. After all, if the server chassis is a commodity now (and it absolutely is), no point making custom small runs to make a hypothetical Storage Pod 7. Economies of scale is too big a benefit (worst case scenario: its now Dell's or Supermicro's problem rather than Backblaze's).

EDIT: I admit that I don't really work in IT, I'm just a programmer. So I don't really know how popular 4U / ~60 HDD servers were before Backblaze Storage Pod 1.0

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#23

Post by walrus01 »

dragontamer wrote: post #22

I have to imagine that by making Storage Pods 1.0 through 6.0, maybe they "encouraged" Dell (and other manufacturers) that this particular 60+ hard drive server was a good idea. And now that multiple "storage pod-like" systems exist in the marketplace (not just Dell, but also Supermicro) selling 60-bay or 90-bay 3.5" Hard drive storage servers in 4U rack form factors, there's not much reason to build their own? At le…

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.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#24

Post by briffle »

walrus01 wrote: post #23
dragontamer wrote: post #22

I have to imagine that by making Storage Pods 1.0 through 6.0, maybe they "encouraged" Dell (and other manufacturers) that this particular 60+ hard drive server was a good idea. And now that multiple "storage pod-like" systems exist in the marketplace (not just Dell, but also Supermicro) selling 60-bay or 90-bay 3.5" Hard drive storage servers in 4U rack form factors, there's not much reason to build their own? At le…

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...

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#25

Post by pram »

dragontamer wrote: post #22

I have to imagine that by making Storage Pods 1.0 through 6.0, maybe they "encouraged" Dell (and other manufacturers) that this particular 60+ hard drive server was a good idea. And now that multiple "storage pod-like" systems exist in the marketplace (not just Dell, but also Supermicro) selling 60-bay or 90-bay 3.5" Hard drive storage servers in 4U rack form factors, there's not much reason to build their own? At le…

They existed for other applications, like NetApp and the ZFS Appliance. Long, long before 2009.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#26

Post by josefresco »

richwater wrote: post #20
that_lurker wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not yet, but when Chia pools become available the mining will take off and hdd prices will most likely rice

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/

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#27

Post by bluedino »

dragontamer wrote: post #22

I have to imagine that by making Storage Pods 1.0 through 6.0, maybe they "encouraged" Dell (and other manufacturers) that this particular 60+ hard drive server was a good idea. And now that multiple "storage pod-like" systems exist in the marketplace (not just Dell, but also Supermicro) selling 60-bay or 90-bay 3.5" Hard drive storage servers in 4U rack form factors, there's not much reason to build their own? At le…

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.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#28

Post by wilhil »

I'm curious what is being used for the drives (and to a lesser extent, memory) - Dell or OEM and how does support work?

We sell a lot of Dell and for base models, it is very economical compared to self built.

The moment however we add a few high capacity hard drives or memory, all bets are off the table and it's usually 1.75-4x the price of a white box part.

I get not supporting the part itself, but, had them not support a raid card error (corrupt memory) after they saw we had a third party drive.... we only buy a handful of servers a month - I can imagine this possibly being a huge problem for Backblaze though...

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#29

Post by dragontamer »

bluedino wrote: post #27
dragontamer wrote: post #22

I have to imagine that by making Storage Pods 1.0 through 6.0, maybe they "encouraged" Dell (and other manufacturers) that this particular 60+ hard drive server was a good idea. And now that multiple "storage pod-like" systems exist in the marketplace (not just Dell, but also Supermicro) selling 60-bay or 90-bay 3.5" Hard drive storage servers in 4U rack form factors, there's not much reason to build their own? At le…

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 can handle that 9GB/s to a variety of switches).

We're looking at PCIe 3.0 x32 just for HDDs and Networking. Throw down a NVMe-cache or other stuff and I'm not seeing any kind of small system working out here.

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Then the math comes in: matrix multiplications over every bit of data to verify checksums and reed-solomon error correction starts to get expensive. Maybe if you had an FPGA or some kind of specialist DSP (lol GPUs maybe, since they're good at matrix multiplication), you can handle the bandwidth. But it seems nontrivial to me.

Server CPU seems to be a cheap and simple answer: get the large number of PCIe I/O lanes plus a beefy CPU to handle the calculations. Maybe a cheap CPU with many I/O lanes going to a GPU / FPGA / ASIC for the error checking math, but... specialized chips cost money. I don't think a cheap low-power CPU would be powerful enough to perform real-time error correction calculations over 9GBps of data.

--------

We can leave Backblaze's workload and think about typical SAN or NAS workloads too. More I/O is needed if you add NVMe storage to cache hard drive reads/writes, tons of RAM is needed if you plan to dedup.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#30

Post by bluedino »

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…

Xeon E5-1620 last I saw
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