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The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

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Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#91

Post by dekhn »

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...

I remember when I worked in a company that was a netapp shop, and in 2007, they sent one of the ZFS developers and andy bechtolsheim to sell us thumper and ZFS. The developer and I had a spirited discussion of the relative merits of having volume management built into the filesystem.

At the time I advised my company to skip the storage servers (which were overdesigned IMHO, but were unquestionably stout hardware) but that ZFS was an interesting filesystem to explore.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#92

Post by nightfly »

Aeolun wrote: post #87

May just be me, but I feel like it’s probably a bad idea to outsource one of your core competencies. Backblaze is quite literally built on their storage pods. It’s like outsourcing the EU telecommunications, which we’ve seen a bunch of articles about recently.

They're building out in a new location where doing it themselves was cost-prohibitive.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#93

Post by lostlogin »

Aeolun wrote: post #87

May just be me, but I feel like it’s probably a bad idea to outsource one of your core competencies. Backblaze is quite literally built on their storage pods. It’s like outsourcing the EU telecommunications, which we’ve seen a bunch of articles about recently.

By my reading of the article, making up chassis and building out servers was outsourced already and was a pita because it wasn’t a core competency. At least that was my take.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#94

Post by electroly »

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…

> Considering you rarely write on the pod

Isn't Backblaze's workload nearly exclusively writes? People back up far, far more often than they restore.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#95

Post by deskamess »

chx wrote: post #80
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.

Even for streaming of video files? I thought you had to use Cloudflares other product for that.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#96

Post by Aeolun »

nightfly wrote: post #92
Aeolun wrote: post #87

May just be me, but I feel like it’s probably a bad idea to outsource one of your core competencies. Backblaze is quite literally built on their storage pods. It’s like outsourcing the EU telecommunications, which we’ve seen a bunch of articles about recently.

They're building out in a new location where doing it themselves was cost-prohibitive.

That’s always the reasoning. I’m sure doing your own telecommunications is also cost-prohibitive.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#97

Post by mattst88 »

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...

Hah! That was the system my small university IT department bought to act as a storage server. Actually they bought 2, with one to act as a backup.

Unfortunately for them, no one knew how to administrate Solaris, so they... installed Windows. No idea if they actually succeeded in doing anything useful with the systems.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#98

Post by killingtime74 »

electroly wrote: post #94
dwild wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Considering you rarely write on the pod Isn't Backblaze's workload nearly exclusively writes? People back up far, far more often than they restore.

I think from the other commenters perspective the workload is almost exclusively idle. Also they do object storage now, not just backup

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#99

Post by adityapatadia »

deskamess wrote: post #95
chx wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even for streaming of video files? I thought you had to use Cloudflares other product for that.

We tried to use B2 for storing image and video files. First byte out is very slow (as expected). We however experienced bigger issues where if you try to upload millions of files per minute in their system, it crumbles. Huge amount of errors were thrown and their support could not help.

We decided to stick with king of storage AWS S3.

Re: The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

#100

Post by ahmedalsudani »

kag0 wrote: post #88
ahmedalsudani wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nowaday…

> BackBlaze is definitely a SaaS company agreed, but I think s3 is the more realistic comparison than dropbox

100%. It’s why their margins are way leaner.
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