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Am I correct in assuming that the performance improvements of SSDs are worthless for your use case? It seems like the workload of Backblaze (like many "big dat
by DanielDent 10y ago
Am I correct in assuming that the performance improvements of SSDs are worthless for your use case?
It seems like the workload of Backblaze (like many "big data" workloads) is such that the extra IOPS don't actually help.
With thousands of drive spindles, and a very small portion of the data on on the spindles being needed at any given moment, I don't imagine you are actually limited by the performance of spinning rust.
- brianwski 10y ago> the performance improvements of SSDs are worthless No way! We are disk I/O limited right now. We think we can approximately double our performance simply by using SSDs instead of traditional 7200 RPM drives. I'm advocating for building an "SSD Pod" built with 1 or 2 TByte SSDs. > and a very small portion of the data on on the spindles being needed at any given moment With our original Personal Backup product that was true. Everybody was happy with waiting a few hours for their restores to complete. But with our new product line of B2 (competes with Amazon S3) then suddenly performance can matter much more, because programmers using B2 might be implementing all sorts of different access patterns. If those programmers are using B2 to implement online backup, then yes, still fine. But if the programmers are building hacker news or reddit or Dropbox the access patterns might require faster IOPS to be more responsive.
- DanielDent 10y agoI guess the B2 product is growing quickly or is where you are looking to drive growth? Or are you using different storage pools for different products? It's surprising to hear this. I would have thought that your backup workloads would leave enough unused IOPS that you wouldn't be anywhere close to hitting a performance ceiling. What metrics do you optimize towards? Tail latency?