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

41–50 of 118 posts

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#41

Post by zrail »

briffle wrote: post #24
walrus01 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

IIRC the company I was at at the time had a set of thumpers for something. Maybe a SAN?

They were incredibly cool for the time.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#42

Post by gnopgnip »

tpetry wrote: post #7
jleahy wrote: post #2

I'm surprised Dell don't make they buy hard drives from them at a substantial mark-up, as they allude to vendors doing earlier in the story.

Or dell forces them to buy their drives but their markup is not as high as their competitors?

If you are buying in bulk the pricing can be a lot better than the list prices. But generally there isn't a problem buying a server without a drive, Dell will still support the server for non disk related warranty issues, you don't need special firmware or disks

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#43

Post by notyourday »

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.

That's not the backblaze design. The backblaze design is that the drives are individually hot-swappable without a tray. 60 commodity SATA drives that can be removed and serviced individually while a 4U server continues to operate normally is pretty amazing.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#44

Post by notyourday »

dangerboysteve wrote: post #40
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.

They are fantastic.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#45

Post by encryptluks2 »

I can't say that I'm surprised, and honestly anyone can open source the architecture for a storage array of comparable use. I think the only unique thing here really is the chassis, but there are plenty of whitebox vendors that sell storage chassis. You may not get as many drives in one, but usually the other components in these things are usually pretty cheap minus the storage. I don't really see this being a loss in the community at all, and maybe someone else will get creative and build something better.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#46

Post by ocdtrekkie »

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…

Especially flash storage goes through the roof at enterprise purchasing. I've bought the drive trays and used consumer SSDs in servers more than a few times with no real ill effects where SATA is acceptable. If you need SAS, you just need to accept the pain that is about to come when you order.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#47

Post by scottlamb »

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…

> They're running a fair bit of math (probably Reed Solomon matrix multiplications for error correction) over all the data accesses.

Do those run on this machine? I imagine backblaze has redundancy at the cluster level rather than machine level. That allows them to lose a single machine without any data becoming unavailable. It also means we shouldn't assume the erasure code calculations happen on a machine with 60 drives attached. That's still possible but alternatively the client [1] could do those calculations and the drive machines could simply handle read/write raw chunks. This can mean less network bandwidth [2] and better load balancing (heavier calculations done further from the stateful component).

[1] Meaning a machine handling a user-facing request or re-replication after drive/machine loss.

[2] Assume data is divided into slices that are reconstructed from N/M chunks, such that each chunk is smaller than its slice. [3] On read, the client-side erasure code design means N chunk transfers from drive machine to client. If instead the client queries one of the relevant drive machines, that machine has to receive N-1 chunks from the others and send back a full slice. (Similar for writes.) More network traffic on the drive machine and across the network in total, less on the client.

[3] This assumption might not make sense if they care more about minimizing seeks on read than minimizing bytes stored. Then they might have at least one full copy that doesn't require accessing the others.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#48

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#49

Post by jleahy »

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.

Indeed, I was thinking of 45Drives.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#50

Post by erikpt-work »

bluedino wrote: post #10

Any idea what Dell is actually selling them? The DVR's we buy (Avigilon) are white Dell 7x0's with a custom white bezel, but those only fit 18 3.5" drives.

Could be the MD3060e with an R650 server?

https://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/shared-content/data-shee...

Post reply on HN