Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

backblaze.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 118 posts

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#31

Post by francoisfeugeas »

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.

A French SDS company, now owned by OVH, did exactly that a few years ago : https://fr.slideshare.net/openio/openio-serverless-storage-7...

I don't think they actually sold any.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#32

Post by gpm »

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…

I'm not familiar with the algorithms, but matrix multiplication sounds well suited towards GPUs. I wonder if you could get away with a much cheaper CPU and a cheaper GPU for less cost?

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#33

Post by dragontamer »

gpm wrote: post #32
dragontamer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not familiar with the algorithms, but matrix multiplication sounds well suited towards GPUs. I wonder if you could get away with a much cheaper CPU and a cheaper GPU for less cost?

But the main issue with GPUs (or FPGAs / ASICs) is now you need to send 9GBps to some other chip AND back again.

Which means 9GBps downstream (to be processed by the GPU) + 9GBps upstream (GPU is done with the data), or a total bandwidth of 18GBps aggregate to the GPU / FPGA / ASIC / whatever coprocessor you're using.

So that's what? Another 32x lanes of PCIe 3.0? Maybe a 16x PCIE 4.0 GPU can handle that kind of I/O... but you can see that moving all this data around is non-trivial, even if we assume the math is instantaneous.

---------

Practically speaking, it seems like any CPU with enough PCIe bandwidth to handle this traffic is a CPU beefy enough to seemingly run the math.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#34

Post by igravious »

infogulch wrote: post #4

If low volume is a problem for manufacturers because you don't need that much, the obvious solution is to increase volume by selling them. Of course that would introduce even more problems to solve, but at least volume wouldn't be one of them.

fta: “Right after we introduced Storage Pod 1.0 to the world, we had to make a decision as to whether or not to make and sell Storage Pods in addition to our cloud-based services. We did make and sell a few Storage Pods—we needed the money—but we eventually chose software.”

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#35

Post by igravious »

jleahy wrote: post #6
infogulch wrote: post #4

If low volume is a problem for manufacturers because you don't need that much, the obvious solution is to increase volume by selling them. Of course that would introduce even more problems to solve, but at least volume wouldn't be one of them.

They already sell them, but personally I thought they were too expensive, probably they were adding a mark-up on their build price when selling them.

Not any more they don't, fta: “Right after we introduced Storage Pod 1.0 to the world, we had to make a decision as to whether or not to make and sell Storage Pods in addition to our cloud-based services. We did make and sell a few Storage Pods—we needed the money—but we eventually chose software.”

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#36

Post by igravious »

bluedino wrote: post #12
jleahy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already sell them, but personally I thought they were too expensive, probably they were adding a mark-up on their build price when selling them.

I don't think Backblaze ever sold them, but 45Drives does. I'm not sure if they assemble them for BB or if they were just using their published design.

they did at one point, fta: “Right after we introduced Storage Pod 1.0 to the world, we had to make a decision as to whether or not to make and sell Storage Pods in addition to our cloud-based services. We did make and sell a few Storage Pods—we needed the money—but we eventually chose software.”

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#37

Post by wfleming »

wilhil wrote: post #28

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 sup…

Backblaze has usually sourced their own hard drives, and I suspect they still are/will. (The post didn't seem to indicate otherwise.)

Every year they post a summary of what models they're working with and how they perform, which is usually good reading. This is last year's: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-fo....

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#39

Post by ceejayoz »

amelius wrote: post #38

Title is misleading as there is no next Backblaze storage pod, and there never will be, according to the article.

"The Next Backblaze Storage Pod" is commercially available storage from Dell. It's a little clickbaity, but it's both a) the title of the article, which HN encourages using and b) accurate.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#40

Post by dangerboysteve »

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…

The company which manufactures the metal cases created a spinoff company called 45Drives which sells commercially supported pods.
Post reply on HN