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A 96 bay 4U chassis is readily available http://www.raidinc.com/products/object-storage/ability-4u-96-bay http://www.raidinc.com/products/object-storage/abilit

by chx 11y ago

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

codemac 11y ago
Oh nice, I hadn't seen that! Need to look more at it's data sheet.
atYevP 11y ago
Heh, any place where I have to request a quote before they show me a price makes me nervous :D
- epistasis 11y ago
  It should if you're thinking of buying one-offs. But at bigger scales like yours, you can either invest in crew to design chassis, or in purchasing people to deal with other sales people.
codemac 11y ago
Intel Atom is an odd choice, but liking the ethernet choice. Gonna look more into how they lay the disks out. I wonder what the serviceability of the drives is.
hrez 11y ago
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.
- codemac 11y ago
  They have an Intel Atom addon module thingie, but the CPU can only really run 2x4Gb best case, almost all of these will need separate software running on Xeons.
devonkim 11y ago
A couple years ago I found out Google was already using 8TB+ drives in production before they hit the wide retail drive distribution market, so I would reckon that many companies with deep pockets and inside vendor relationships would be able to get access to some very high density disks that folks like Backblaze may not be able to get yet. There's also possibilities for better density through solid state that may not make much sense from a raw $ / GB storage basis that drives Backblaze while tiered storage may be essential for how Dropbox operates. Also, I imagine it'd be possible to centralize and strengthen cooling while shoving a bunch of disks into a 4U box to increase raw drive density. For example, you could use a variant of peltier cooling to have drives chilled together off a single metal plate, then repeat a few times in a chassis. So in short, I can think of improvements but most would come at the cost of higher capex to do so, and that could negatively impact the $ / GB numbers that Backblaze is trying to keep down. Perhaps there's not much consideration for leasing datacenter real estate or power costs or something into the equations but without some reliable numbers it's all speculation to me.

by chx 11y ago

codemac 11y ago

Oh nice, I hadn't seen that! Need to look more at it's data sheet.

atYevP 11y ago

Heh, any place where I have to request a quote before they show me a price makes me nervous :D

epistasis 11y ago
It should if you're thinking of buying one-offs. But at bigger scales like yours, you can either invest in crew to design chassis, or in purchasing people to deal with other sales people.

codemac 11y ago

Intel Atom is an odd choice, but liking the ethernet choice. Gonna look more into how they lay the disks out. I wonder what the serviceability of the drives is.

hrez 11y ago

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.

codemac 11y ago
They have an Intel Atom addon module thingie, but the CPU can only really run 2x4Gb best case, almost all of these will need separate software running on Xeons.

devonkim 11y ago

A couple years ago I found out Google was already using 8TB+ drives in production before they hit the wide retail drive distribution market, so I would reckon that many companies with deep pockets and inside vendor relationships would be able to get access to some very high density disks that folks like Backblaze may not be able to get yet. There's also possibilities for better density through solid state that may not make much sense from a raw $ / GB storage basis that drives Backblaze while tiered storage may be essential for how Dropbox operates. Also, I imagine it'd be possible to centralize and strengthen cooling while shoving a bunch of disks into a 4U box to increase raw drive density. For example, you could use a variant of peltier cooling to have drives chilled together off a single metal plate, then repeat a few times in a chassis. So in short, I can think of improvements but most would come at the cost of higher capex to do so, and that could negatively impact the $ / GB numbers that Backblaze is trying to keep down. Perhaps there's not much consideration for leasing datacenter real estate or power costs or something into the equations but without some reliable numbers it's all speculation to me.