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

Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

backblaze.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 222 posts

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#91

Post by hrez »

chx wrote: post #67
codemac wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.sh…

A 96 bay 4U chassis is readily available http://www.raidinc.com/products/object-storage/ability-4u-96... but that's still not a magnitude.

That's just a storage enclosure. You'd need a separate server with SAS connectivity to use that. It still may be worth it $$/Gb wise depending on cost.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#92

Post by rakoo »

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…

> 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.

Blog post or it didn't happen :)

Seriously though, there seems to be some really cool engineering at Dropbox, first with Go usage (https://twitter.com/jamwt/status/629727590782099456) and now with your storage capacity. We're all craving for more infrastructure details, see what you consider as the state of the art and how you use the different pieces of software/language !

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#93

Post by therobot24 »

rgoodwintx wrote: post #8
therobot24 wrote: post #5

love the rundowns, sad that their service is just so disappointing

Details? I don't work for BB, but have worked in the backup industry for some time in my past, and always curious.

takes forever, and now the file list takes 8GB+ of space - support says the only way to fix the problem is to create a new account and go through the months of backing everything up again

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#94

Post by therobot24 »

jakeva wrote: post #10
therobot24 wrote: post #5

love the rundowns, sad that their service is just so disappointing

I've used BB for years on multiple machines and have been more than satisfied, in fact I recommend it to everyone. I'm not affiliated with them at all, just a happy customer. Confused as to why someone would find their service disappointing but to each their own.

it takes months to get everything backed up, and now the just the file lists or whatever is taking up 8GB+ on my disk (i use a smaller SSD as the primary drive so space is precious). I contacted support and their only solution is to create a new account and go through many more months of backing everything up again.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#95

Post by howeyc »

Interesting, with this information and some idea of what they pay for electricity +support staff/drive replacements/maintenance you could probably figure out their break-even mark.

Their cost for the pod (which they say includes labor) comes out to 0.044/GB. The cost of redundancy is 3/20 drives, which would place the cost to 0.0517/GB of data. They are planning to charge 0.005/GB on the B2 service this is made for. That's 10-11 months to break even on the initial cost. Add electricity + maintenance costs (of which I have no idea what it is) and you get the break-even number. My guess is that it'd be 1 year. So however long each pod lasts past 1 year is gravy (aside from the electricity + maintenance costs).

Amazon S3 must be making a killing. As a customer you must be paying for the cost of the "pod" every 2 months.

Please excuse me while I buy stock in Amazon/Box/Dropbox/Backblaze/etc....

----

As a aside, as a personal user if you store over 1TB you are getting storage at a cheaper cost than B2 users. If under 1 TB you'd be better of using B2.

Seems to me that the average storage per user must be well under 1 TB on their unlimited plans.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#96

Post by budmang »

wyldfire wrote: post #57
budmang wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

That quote refers to something very specific and you may not want to align yourself or your thoughts about licensing with that movement. The creative commons and OSI are two excellent places to start looking at licenses. creativecommons.org and opensource.org

Not trying to align with any movement. Just saying that we give the design away. Appreciate all the feedback and we'll re-look at adding a license.

To be clear on our philosophy - we don't want to restrict people from building these for their own purposes, modifying them, giving away the design, selling the boxes, etc.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#97

Post by dragonwriter »

aroch wrote: post #21
venomsnake wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, have used BB for 5 years (and still using, the service is totally fine): Initial sync is a nighmare. The upload is on the slow side. Biggest gripe so far is that I just cannot tell the client that some files are more important than the others. I would love my pdf invoices and changed KDBX files to be synced before uploading the uncompressed blu ray of Guardians of the galaxy. On the other hand there are p…

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…

> What's the point of backing up a bluray rip?

What's the point of backing up anything?

> Either you have the source material, in which case its almost always going to be faster to rerip than restore from backup

Sure, it will be faster, because it will be a local operation, because you probably keep the original near the same place you keep the main rip. That also means that the original source and the in-use rip are vulnerable to being destroyed together in a site-affecting event (fire, flood, robbery, etc.), which makes having a remote backup valuable.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#98

Post by rstupek »

codemac wrote: post #49
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.sh…

Maybe his definition of an order of magnitude is different than anyone elses? I'd like to hear how many drives and what size he's talking about

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#99

Post by lqdc13 »

Wow, all the components are crazy overpriced. You can get the same system built for probably 1/3 the price with the same level of quality.

Example is the motherboard for $500+, the fans for $20 each, on off switch for $25, 8gb of DDR3 ram for $90???? etc.

The saving grace is the hard drives that are decently priced and make up the bulk of the cost.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#100

Post by budmang »

howeyc wrote: post #95

Interesting, with this information and some idea of what they pay for electricity +support staff/drive replacements/maintenance you could probably figure out their break-even mark. Their cost for the pod (which they say includes labor) comes out to 0.044/GB. The cost of redundancy is 3/20 drives, which would place the cost to 0.0517/GB of data. They are planning to charge 0.005/GB on the B2 service this is made for.…

Excellent analysis. There are some other costs involved (bandwidth, switches/cabinets, non-pod servers, etc.), but pods & drives dominate the costs, so your math is good.

You're also right that 1 TB is the approximate breakeven between Backblaze per-GB cloud storage & unlimited online backup by cost and most people are below that. However, the main reason for people to use the backup service is that we take care of all the backup functions (encryption, dedup, compression, restores, etc.)

> Please excuse me while I buy stock in Amazon/Box/Dropbox/Backblaze/etc....

Alas, Backblaze stock isn't yet available for sale ;-)

BTW, thanks for being a customer!

Gleb

Post reply on HN