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The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

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Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#71

Post by ahmedalsudani »

choppaface wrote: post #68

> That’s a trivial number of parts and vendors for a hardware company, but stating the obvious, Backblaze is a software company. Stating the obvious: Backblaze wants investors to value them like a SaaS company. This blog post suggests they’re more of a logistics and product company— huge capex and depreciating assets on hand. As a customer, I like their product, but they’re no Dropbox. If they would allow personal NA…

It's easy to buy a bunch of hard drives and connect in a data center. Managing petabytes per user for thousands of users is the hard part, and it's a software problem.

BackBlaze is definitely a SaaS company... though the quality of their offering certainly lags behind Dropbox, both in terms of feature set and user experience. They're also in a very competitive industry. Storage/backup is basically a commodity nowadays.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#72

Post by wmf »

choppaface wrote: post #68

> That’s a trivial number of parts and vendors for a hardware company, but stating the obvious, Backblaze is a software company. Stating the obvious: Backblaze wants investors to value them like a SaaS company. This blog post suggests they’re more of a logistics and product company— huge capex and depreciating assets on hand. As a customer, I like their product, but they’re no Dropbox. If they would allow personal NA…

Dropbox owns more hardware than Backblaze.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#73

Post by nine_k »

dwild wrote: post #52
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…

> Given the bandwidth of 60+ hard drives (150MB/s per hard drive x 60 == 9GB/s in/out) Given their scale and goal, it would be pretty wasteful to build it to max the writing speed of all hard drives. Considering you rarely write on the pod, you would be better of getting a fraction of that speed and writing on multiple pods at the same time to get the required peak performance. In fact actually that makes much more s…

Read load alone can be pretty high.

And no, you want to calculate checksums and fix bit errors right here in the RAM buffers you just read or received, because at such scales hardware is not error-free.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#74

Post by ricardobeat »

choppaface wrote: post #68

> That’s a trivial number of parts and vendors for a hardware company, but stating the obvious, Backblaze is a software company. Stating the obvious: Backblaze wants investors to value them like a SaaS company. This blog post suggests they’re more of a logistics and product company— huge capex and depreciating assets on hand. As a customer, I like their product, but they’re no Dropbox. If they would allow personal NA…

I sync my NAS to Backblaze B2 without any issues, and pricing is great.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#75

Post by wrikl »

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.

The author recently commented: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/next-backblaze-storage-pod/#c...

It's apparently the "Dell PowerEdge R740xd2 rack server".

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#76

Post by Dylan16807 »

dragontamer wrote: post #33
gpm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

PCIE 3.0 is 1GB/s per lane in each direction. A 3.0 8x link would do a good job of saturating the drives. And basically any CPU could run 8x to the storage controllers and 8x to a GPU. Get any Ryzen chip and you can run 4 lanes directly to a network card too.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#77

Post by wtallis »

amelius wrote: post #38

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

> and there never will be, according to the article.

The article doesn't say that. It says:

> So the question is: Will there ever be a Storage Pod 7.0 and beyond? We want to say yes. We’re still control freaks at heart, meaning we’ll want to make sure we can make our own storage servers so we are not at the mercy of “Big Server Inc.” In addition, we do see ourselves continuing to invest in the platform so we can take advantage of and potentially create new, yet practical ideas in the space (Storage Pod X anyone?). So, no, we don’t think Storage Pods are dead, they’ll just have a diverse group of storage server friends to work with.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#78

Post by nine_k »

dragontamer wrote: post #33
gpm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

If only the ASIC on the HDD could run these computations and correct bit errors right during data transfers!

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#79

Post by dragontamer »

nine_k wrote: post #78
dragontamer wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

If only the ASIC on the HDD could run these computations and correct bit errors right during data transfers!

The HDD ASIC certainly is doing those computations.

The issue is that Backblaze has a 2nd layer of error correction codes. This 2nd layer of error correction codes needs to be calculated somewhere. If enough errors come from a drive, the administrators take down the box and replace the hard-drives and resilver the data.

Backblaze physically distributes the data over 20 separate computers in 20 separate racks. Some computer needs to run the math to "Combine" the data (error correction + checksums and all) back into the original data on every single read. So singular hard drive can do this math because the data has been reliably dispersed to so many different computers.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#80

Post by chx »

choppaface wrote: post #68

> That’s a trivial number of parts and vendors for a hardware company, but stating the obvious, Backblaze is a software company. Stating the obvious: Backblaze wants investors to value them like a SaaS company. This blog post suggests they’re more of a logistics and product company— huge capex and depreciating assets on hand. As a customer, I like their product, but they’re no Dropbox. If they would allow personal NA…

For me the Big Deal is Backblaze B2. Especially when fronted by Cloudflare -- zero traffic costs. Storage is cheap as far as cloud storage provider goes and traffic is decidedly the cheapest possible.
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