The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods • Hacker News Board

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#21

Post by hinkley » Wed, Jan 03, 2024, 8:53 PM UTC

wannacboatmovie wrote: post #8

stackskipton wrote: post #5

Is there any information what lead to Backblaze to stop making their own hardware and going with COTS?

Yes, building your own shit is expensive. Tale as old as time. Before someone uses Google's servers as an example, I would say that strapping together consumer grade components with zip ties and no case isn't what I'd consider a 'server'; rather, a loose collection of parts.

Google has 3 orders of magnitude more servers than I’ll ever need. With that sort of difference it’s not only a change of solution but also a change of rules.

We simply do not witness the same bottlenecks.

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#22

Post by nerdponx » Wed, Jan 03, 2024, 8:56 PM UTC

pqdbr wrote: post #18

I really wished Backblaze B2 worked better to be a real alternative to S3. The pricing is a middle finger to AWS and other providers. However, we were having 1 outage per month with B2, and in the middle of 2023 we decided to go back to AWS and only use S3 for replication. We still monitor both services simultaneously (S3 and B2), and every other month we are still having an episode where the latency rises from 15ms…

It works pretty well for low-volume ad-hoc data storage at least. I use it for personal data science projects.

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#23

Post by eropple » Wed, Jan 03, 2024, 8:57 PM UTC

pqdbr wrote: post #18

I really wished Backblaze B2 worked better to be a real alternative to S3. The pricing is a middle finger to AWS and other providers. However, we were having 1 outage per month with B2, and in the middle of 2023 we decided to go back to AWS and only use S3 for replication. We still monitor both services simultaneously (S3 and B2), and every other month we are still having an episode where the latency rises from 15ms…

Have you looked at Cloudflare R2? I've had good luck there, but am exercising it only lightly.

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#24

Post by tempest_ » Wed, Jan 03, 2024, 8:57 PM UTC

pqdbr wrote: post #18

I really wished Backblaze B2 worked better to be a real alternative to S3. The pricing is a middle finger to AWS and other providers. However, we were having 1 outage per month with B2, and in the middle of 2023 we decided to go back to AWS and only use S3 for replication. We still monitor both services simultaneously (S3 and B2), and every other month we are still having an episode where the latency rises from 15ms…

It has been a while since I looked but CFs R2 was cheaper than s3 the last I looked, never used it though.

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#25

Post by mmmooo » Wed, Jan 03, 2024, 9:00 PM UTC

atesti wrote: post #20

Does anybody know which Dell product they use? Dell also has JBOD enclosures like Powervault MD2460

they mention servers, so possibly not jbods, but R740xd2 (or newer R760xd2). The former are 26x3.5" so would match what they describe.

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#26

Post by gorkish » Wed, Jan 03, 2024, 9:02 PM UTC

The most interesting thing here is the discussion about using vendor hardware instead of their own bespoke stuff.

My takeaway is that it's still essentially impossible to negotiate anywhere close to a fair price with commodity server vendors until you are buying hundreds of machines, and then only if you are capable of demonstrating that you are willing to design and build them yourself. And yet despite this, it's still cheaper than cloud even paying advertised prices.

Where do regular people buy servers without insane markup if you need say 10-20? Used to be I could actually buy supermicro barebones, but that ended a really long time ago.

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#27

Post by hinkley » Wed, Jan 03, 2024, 9:05 PM UTC

ericbarrett wrote: post #15

stackskipton wrote: post #5

Is there any information what lead to Backblaze to stop making their own hardware and going with COTS?

My sense is that storage server prices have had to come down to compete with both cloud (like S3 archival tiers) and roll-your-own solutions. The former are relatively recent and the latter have become more feasible as companies—Backblaze among them—have open sourced well-engineered designs. Storage server margin used to be insane, over 80% after COGS back in the 00s and only slightly less last decade, and there's st…

I hope history will eventually read something like this:

In the aftermath of the Dot Com Bust, manufacturers became conservative, and lost their ability to dream big. Into this power vacuum stepped the so called Cloud Providers, who in some cases made their own hardware and tools to solve their problems.

Over time manufacturing caught up, missing tools were written, and the Cloud providers went back to solving the main problem nearly none of their customers of suppliers could ever solve: the speed of light (locality).

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#28

Post by mynameisnoone » Wed, Jan 03, 2024, 9:10 PM UTC

Boooo! No drive manufacturer names and model numbers. This is totally useless data for anyone so it's absolutely pointless to blog about.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-... contains the necessary data, but it seems old.

I don't know why they're buying COTS server gear because their whole premise was the economy-of-scale of having their own pods made. I don't understand why they don't go to Quanta or Foxxconn to build them whatever they need because Dell is really just a marketing front like CDW that relies heavily on third-party contract designers and major component manufacturing, and then only does final assembly itself.

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#29

Post by joshfee » Wed, Jan 03, 2024, 9:11 PM UTC

I use B2 as the backend for my personal backups using restic (which I would highly recommend https://github.com/restic/restic). I don't have a ton of data to backup, so even with hourly backups (restic only backs up when there are changes) I have ~100GB and it runs me a whopping $0.60/month. I almost feel guilty when I get the bill. But the minute I need to pick a storage platform in a professional context I know what my first choice will be.

(I am _not_ affiliated with Backblaze in anyway. Just a happy user)

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#30

Post by zdw » Wed, Jan 03, 2024, 9:14 PM UTC

stackskipton wrote: post #5

Is there any information what lead to Backblaze to stop making their own hardware and going with COTS?

I would imagine that in the early days there was nothing that met the requirements. Early on very few systems had the drive density needed - products like Sun's Thumper with 48 drives (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Fire_X4500) were few and far between.

Today there are lots of high storage density devices, so no point to build your own if you can get it already engineered and with a warranty from somewhere else.