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Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

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Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#41

Post by cenal »

atYevP wrote: post #37
wyldfire wrote: post #33

It's astonishing that Backblaze would release its drawings as open source, good for you! But there's no explicit license declaration anywhere in the drawings zipfile and in fact some of the drawings claim "PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS DRAWING IS THE SOLE PROPERTY OF BACKBLAZE MANUFACTURING. ANY REPRODUCTION IN PART OR AS A WHOLE WITHOUT THE WRITTEN PERMISSION OF BACKBLAZE MANUFACTURI…

Yev from Backblaze here -> That is boilerplate for the most part, but it's open source, have at it!

What license is it under?

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#42

Post by derekp7 »

atYevP wrote: post #38
derekp7 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about network boot? Or do you find that to be too unreliable?

Not 100% sure if we've given that any thorough testing, but the ops team is looking at most available options before building these out. That said, if they haven't tried it, they'll read this and give it a go :)

Another option -- check out the very low profile USB thumbdrives (the one I've got sticks out about 4mm or so). Or see if you can get motherboards with an internal USB or SD socket. Maybe combine this with PXE boot for initial setup (the pod gets built with a blank internal thumbdrive, and on first boot it installs the Linux kernel and initial ramdisk image on the thumbdrive). Edit: It looks like the motherboard you use does have a USB header on the motherboard, where you can plug in a boot thumbdrive.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#43

Post by budmang »

mikeash wrote: post #29
atYevP wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question! As part of the process for developing these we spend months and months using AGILE/SCRUM to iterate and come up with a "final answer" (though we're constantly still iterating). So it's not so much that we gain anything from writing the posts, the posts are more of a culmination of months of effort. We do end up talking about the pods more closely when we're writing the posts and as part of that some mi…

I imagine the marketing angle must be pretty big. Not only making people aware of your service, but convincing people to use it. A big question when selecting any online backup service is, "are these people I'm trusting with my data complete idiots?" Your posts should really help convince a lot of people that you are, in fact, not complete idiots. For what it's worth, I've been a happy customer for years and try to s…

We have gotten some other benefits as well. One of our senior support reps decided to join us after reading an IAmA where we talked about the Storage Pods. We just recently hired a senior sys admin and the head of Facebook's Prineville data center, both of whom were a result of reading our storage posts.

Also, when we work with contract manufacturers on building storage pods, talk with data centers about space, etc., it's really convenient to point to public posts to explain what we're talking about rather than having to put NDA's in place.

Overall it results in a lot of awareness and goodwill. It's incredibly gratifying after the team spends many late nights putting these together.

Gleb from Backblaze

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#44

Post by budmang »

cenal wrote: post #41
atYevP wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yev from Backblaze here -> That is boilerplate for the most part, but it's open source, have at it!

What license is it under?

"Think free as in free speech, not free beer."

It's not under any license, it's just 'free'. We've talked about putting the Storage Pods under a license, and may at some point since we get this question periodically and picking a license that people are familiar with may make it more clear that we really are giving away the design.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#45

Post by mikeash »

atYevP wrote: post #40
mikeash wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine the marketing angle must be pretty big. Not only making people aware of your service, but convincing people to use it. A big question when selecting any online backup service is, "are these people I'm trusting with my data complete idiots?" Your posts should really help convince a lot of people that you are, in fact, not complete idiots. For what it's worth, I've been a happy customer for years and try to s…

You'd think it would be HUGE but it's not, just a side-benefit. We'd love for it to be bigger, but, it's kind of up to the people. If you're a happy Backblaze customer though...might I refer you to our handy dandy referral program: https://www.backblaze.com/refer.html /MarketingOff *Edit -> man, we have to optimize that page for our new design layout... /yells at design team.

Thanks for the link. I was actually going to write something in my comment like, "hey, you guys should have a referral program." Then I realized I ought to check to see if you already did first.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#46

Post by budmang »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #23
atYevP wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yev from Backblaze here -> You're welcome! We're always pretty stoked to do these, even though it does indeed take a lot of man-power to put together. The nice thing is, it's actually helpful! A lot of organizations, companies, and research labs use them, and that makes us feel warm and fuzzy.

I use a Backblaze box as an Archive Team staging environment! Thank you!

Very cool. I remember an article I read about a veteran music journalist who applied for a job and was told he had no experience. Turned out every magazine he worked for over 10+ years had shut down and there was not a single online reference of his articles.

Love that you're fighting the good fight (along with the Internet Archive) to keep a history of the Internet.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#47

Post by [deleted] »

budmang wrote: post #46
toomuchtodo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a Backblaze box as an Archive Team staging environment! Thank you!

Very cool. I remember an article I read about a veteran music journalist who applied for a job and was told he had no experience. Turned out every magazine he worked for over 10+ years had shut down and there was not a single online reference of his articles. Love that you're fighting the good fight (along with the Internet Archive) to keep a history of the Internet.

[deleted]

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#48

Post by budmang »

venomsnake wrote: post #26
aroch wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of backing up a bluray rip? Either you have the source material, in which case its almost always going to be faster to rerip than restore from backup, or you downloaded it once already (for, ahem, free) so why not download it again and not pay the cost of storing that data? Also, I would hope no one doing mastering is uploading their raws, in real time, to a service like backblaze. On-site thunderbol…

I just needed to think of something big. Anyway there is big stuff that is not that important - lets say couple of gigabytes of logs but nice to have. BB folder and file type structure makes it relatively hard to back up just some files of given type. And some stuff like tars and zips could be arbitrary in size and importance.

We definitely focus on ease-of-backup vs. choices-for-backup. One of the initial things we found we the "pick and choose files & folders to backup" approach is what kept most people from setting up a backup at all because they were confused by the process.

Having said that, we offer the ability to exclude folders and filetypes if you have certain things you want to backup later.

(Not disagreeing with anything you're saying...just fyi.)

Gleb from Backblaze

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#49

Post by codemac »

jamwt wrote: post #31

Worth pointing out (for those of you not in the storage game) that these appliances, while cool, are pretty far from state of the art. We're (Dropbox) packing up to an order of magnitude more storage into 4U. And costs aren't close, let alone the addressable throughput given that you guys just went to 10G. Serious kudos though are due for the Backblaze blog. You're all at least talking about what you're up to, which…

What order of magnitude? There are 60 drive chassis in 4U you can get[0][1], but even a 4TB -> 6TB drive + 15 more drives isn't exactly an order of magnitude.

And they have 2 10GiB ports, though I'm sure you can work with them and get more..

It's disingenuous to call this not "state of the art" when it's really quite close, and obviously is meeting a backblaze design goal.

[0]: http://www.newisys.com/Products/4600.shtml [1]: http://www.aicipc.com/ProductDetail.aspx?ref=RSC-4H

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#50

Post by atYevP »

jamwt wrote: post #31

Worth pointing out (for those of you not in the storage game) that these appliances, while cool, are pretty far from state of the art. We're (Dropbox) packing up to an order of magnitude more storage into 4U. And costs aren't close, let alone the addressable throughput given that you guys just went to 10G. Serious kudos though are due for the Backblaze blog. You're all at least talking about what you're up to, which…

Yev here -> #TeamOrangeRed
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