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135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

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Re: 135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

#61

Post by andrewf »

brianwski wrote: post #34
db48x wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Merkle Trees FTW, but it sounds like you've basically reimplemented ZFS. Have you tried using ZFS on one of these?

Earlier we were totally interested in ZFS, as it would replace RAID & LVM as well (and ZFS gets great reviews). But (to my understanding) native ZFS is not available on Linux and we're not really looking to switch to OpenSolaris. ANOTHER option down this line of thinking is switching to btrfs, but we haven't played with it yet. By the way, at Backblaze I've felt like we have had to implement several things that I wou…

gzip and zlib HTTP encodings (different containers for "deflate" compression) include a checksum of the uncompressed content (a CRC-32 variant and Adler-32 respectively). If compression isn't wanted, you can wrap uncompressed bytes with a deflate structure - although it'll have to be split into ~64k chunks with a few header bytes ahead of each.

I'm not sure which HTTP client implementations reliably test those checksums, though. (Or whether CRC32/Adler32 would be adequate for 30 gigs!)

Re: 135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

#62

Post by mrb »

andrewf wrote: post #61
brianwski wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earlier we were totally interested in ZFS, as it would replace RAID & LVM as well (and ZFS gets great reviews). But (to my understanding) native ZFS is not available on Linux and we're not really looking to switch to OpenSolaris. ANOTHER option down this line of thinking is switching to btrfs, but we haven't played with it yet. By the way, at Backblaze I've felt like we have had to implement several things that I wou…

gzip and zlib HTTP encodings (different containers for "deflate" compression) include a checksum of the uncompressed content (a CRC-32 variant and Adler-32 respectively). If compression isn't wanted, you can wrap uncompressed bytes with a deflate structure - although it'll have to be split into ~64k chunks with a few header bytes ahead of each. I'm not sure which HTTP client implementations reliably test those checks…

And when using HTTPS, all corruption introduced by the network stack will be detected (thanks to the MAC in each TLS record).

But brianwski's point remains that neither HTTP encodings, nor HTTPS can detect certain errors like in-memory corruption of the data after it has been read from disk, but before it has been sent out over the HTTP connection.

Re: 135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

#63

Post by grosskur »

brianwski wrote: post #9
bgentry wrote: post #6

What's the RAID config of these boxes? 45 drives, 4 controllers, and a 16TB volume limitation from ext4. Please share if you know! --edit-- I know it's RAID6 from the article. What I'm wondering is, how many drives in an array? How many arrays per box?

At the lowest level there are three RAID groups in each pod. Each RAID group is made of 15 drives configured in software RAID 6 with 2 parity drives. This means you can lose 2 dives and the data is entirely safe and intact. If 3 or more drives completely fail simultaneously (not just pop out of the RAID group or power down, but where that drive is lost forever, like it will never power up again) you will lose at leas…

Just curious: Did you consider XFS? It would avoid the 16TB limit with ext4.

Re: 135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

#64

Post by wmf »

ghoul2 wrote: post #49

The blog post provides some fascinating data, thanks Backblaze! $2100 per month for an entire rack worth of Pods (space, power, connectivity) $74,000 is the cost to build 10 Pods to fill that rack. If the Pods are assumed to have a lifetime of 3 years (most will last longer, but lets depreciate at this rate), and if the cost of capital is 20%/year, this equates to a monthly "payment/amortization" cost of $2750. Thus…

I wonder how much it would cost to install Atmos on a bunch of these pods.

Re: 135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

#65

Post by gasull »

brianwski wrote: post #33
cakeface wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like those XML files are already there when you install the windows or mac version. Why don't you just open them up and edit them by hand?

Honestly, the XML files are pretty simple. The one main one the GUI writes out is called bzinfo.xml and is found on any Mac system at /Library/Backblaze/bzdata/bzinfo.xml and on any Windows Vista or later system at C:\ProgramData\Backblaze\bzdata\bzinfo.xml Backblaze is designed to be used with absolutely no configuration (for many users they have no idea where their Outlook.pst file is and we don't think they should…

we really pride ourselves on easy to use software, so it goes against everything in our DNA to release software with NO GUI at all, but maybe we'll give that a serious thought. If you are using Linux, you probably aren't the average Mom & Pop user. :-)

I just want to join others asking here for a Linux version. Please do release whatever you have. And actually I would prefer a command line tool, so I can use it in my cron.

Re: 135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

#66

Post by wmf »

RShackleford wrote: post #55
jbooth wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, didn't know there was an i3 that supported ECC. Cool.

Curious, according to Intel, it the i3 doesn't do ECC: http://www.intel.com/support/processors/corei3/sb/CS-031175.... But the Supermicro board says it can: http://www.supermicro.com/xeon_3400/Motherboard/X8SIL.cfm The board also supports Xeon processors, so it might be that it only supports ECC with Xeon. However, I didn't see anything in the docs to support this, instead it says "Dual Core processors of Ci3 and Pen…

IIRC, some vendors wanted to offer super-low-end dual-core servers but rather than create a dual-core Xeon SKU Intel decided to just not disable ECC on some of the Pentiums and i3s. (As if their branding wasn't f'd enough.) So yeah, i3s support ECC when used in a server board.

Re: 135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

#67

Post by cpt_yesterday »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #51
cpt_yesterday wrote: post #22

FYI: Protocase ( http://www.protocase.com/ ), the company that will build you the Backblaze case, sent me an email yesterday announcing that they are now selling completed Backblase storage pods without the hard drives for $5395.00. I'm not sure if this is the new design or not but I've set up 3 of these and finding some of the parts (SATA back planes) took weeks of searching and shady dealings.

I'm considering putting a few of these together. Do you have any sources you'd mind sharing (preferably not shady :) for the harder-to-find parts?

The 5 port SATA backplanes were the hardest part to find when I built these. You can get them through http://www.chyangfun.com/ which is who Backblaze gets them through and we did too. They are hard to get ahold of sometimes so that's why I was looking around and found some shady companies selling them. Protocase mentioned above sells these which would probably be the easiest company to get these through.

Other than this, the other parts are pretty standard and are easy to find with some simple searching.

Re: 135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

#68

Post by roel_v »

cdr wrote: post #24
brianwski wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We would like to, we just haven't had time to get it done yet. It runs internally, but is lacking an installer and a GUI, and we would need to prioritize and choose one or more Linux distributions to launch with. Ubuntu is an obvious choice (we focus more on desktop backup than on servers). But some people also ask for CentOS and a few others. It bums me out the Linux community has not solved binary compatibility any…

I think you probably overestimate how much linux users would care about having a GUI. You should ship what you've got.

But even for editing text files you still need - maybe not a GUI, but a layer that checks the file format, gives meaningful error messages on where a syntax error is and why, etc. It's not quite the same amount of work as writing a GUI maybe, and I would also argue that you need this anyway, even when you have a GUI; but I used to think the same until I wrote a few tools that I was going to 'slap a GUI on later' and found that writing/maintaining a command line application also takes time; it's not just a few lines of code that you put before the library that's behind it.

Re: 135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

#69

Post by alfet »

brianwski wrote: post #14
alfet wrote: post #7

Does anyone know if Backblaze will ever support Linux? I've wanted to use their service for a while now, but their lack of Linux support has being a big turn down, and I don't think they have made any change in their statements regarding this 'issue'.

We would like to, we just haven't had time to get it done yet. It runs internally, but is lacking an installer and a GUI, and we would need to prioritize and choose one or more Linux distributions to launch with. Ubuntu is an obvious choice (we focus more on desktop backup than on servers). But some people also ask for CentOS and a few others. It bums me out the Linux community has not solved binary compatibility any…

Hey Brian, thank you for explaining the reasons of why the Linux version hasn't seen the light yet, I have been keeping an eye on Backblaze since this blog entry you wrote http://blog.backblaze.com/2008/12/15/10-rules-for-how-to-wri..., quite a while now, and it sucks that there's still no Linux version available, so as others have mention please consider releasing something.

PS: I'm already one of your costumers and I'd love to be able to use your service in my linux machines.

Re: 135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

#70

Post by ComputerGuru »

brianwski wrote: post #37
ComputerGuru wrote: post #32

I wanted to use Backblaze after hearing people rave about it, but on Lion it completely breaks the network stack somehow during upload/backup..

Yikes, what? We all run Lion here at Backblaze and it works flawlessly for us, and our internal stats show THOUSANDS of Lion customers happily backing up. If you can provide more details of your setup we would LOVE to fix that for you. Since Mac customers make up more than half our customer base, we're completely, 100 percent dedicated to Lion. Send us info or contact us at our company name at twitter or facebook or…

Hi Brian!

I sent an email to sales support explaining my issue on OS X Lion when I was trialing your product, but did not get a response.

Please feel free to contact me at mqudsi@neosmart.net. What I was seeing seemed to be that the software was flooding the network card (wi-fi on a slow WiMax connection) with requests, causing it to timeout entirely such that I could not even ping my router. This doesn't require drivers, kexts, or anything and can be replicated in user mode. It's pretty much akin to DDOSing your own connection.

While I ended up purchasing a Mozy home license for a year, I do not think I'll be staying with them as I am not satisfied with either their client or their backend.

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