5 ms·

Wasn't there a startup on hn some weeks ago that used a crypto mining approach to server management that was much cheaper?

ksec 6y ago
Yes and it had little redundancy with limited up time and speed guarantee, with no S3 API compatibility. And if I remember correctly even that was $0.003 per GB, with lots of unit cost that a lot of people including me thought to be miscalculated, where it should be closer to $0.4 for it to be somewhat break even. So may be it is cheaper, but not really comparable.
ADefenestrator 6y ago
Disclaimer - Backblaze employee here, but just speaking for myself: It was.. sort of cheaper. They didn't actually build the servers, and as described the server wouldn't work (onboard SATA didn't support port multipliers, lack of ECC would probably cause problems in practice, bit hand-wavey on power/space/network/manpower costs, etc). The goal of the article was to get other people to build cheap storage and put it up for rent on their network. They do have some amount of storage space available for very cheap on the network now, but personally I suspect it's people who figured "what the heck, I'll give it a try!" as opposed to people actually building storage servers and making a profit renting them out. I was honestly pretty disappointed - I'd hoped they'd found a cheap motherboard with ECC and support for port multipliers, but nope.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  With the client responsible for chunking, redundancy, and error correction, I don't think the lack of ECC really matters for their use case. The rest of the issues are more important. Edit: The motherboard they picked does support ECC memory, anyway. In general ASRock models do.
  - ADefenestrator 6y ago
    I haven't dug too deeply, but it's unclear whether anything but the Asrock Rack boards have full validated ECC implementations for Ryzen (vs just using the memory but ignoring ECC), and I think that may depend some on which Ryzen CPU is used (maybe PRO-only). I'd love a source of better info there, though. You're right though - since the client's doing the work and they have a lot of redundancy/diversity in the storage it's not as big of a deal for them as it would be for us. I'd be a bit wary because the client-only verification does mean that there's no verification-with-ECC step in the entire chain, but I'm not sure that's significantly worse in terms of actual risk.
- justinclift 6y ago
  How far off do you reckon Backblaze is from designing your own motherboards + electronics, with just the pieces you need? :)
  - ADefenestrator 6y ago
    Pretty far. Since we cram so many drives into each server, our total server count is actually relatively low for the amount of storage we have. I'm not sure exactly how many units you need to amortize the design costs across to make it worth it for a custom ODM design, but I suspect it's in the tens of thousands.

ksec 6y ago

Yes and it had little redundancy with limited up time and speed guarantee, with no S3 API compatibility. And if I remember correctly even that was $0.003 per GB, with lots of unit cost that a lot of people including me thought to be miscalculated, where it should be closer to $0.4 for it to be somewhat break even. So may be it is cheaper, but not really comparable.

ADefenestrator 6y ago

Disclaimer - Backblaze employee here, but just speaking for myself: It was.. sort of cheaper. They didn't actually build the servers, and as described the server wouldn't work (onboard SATA didn't support port multipliers, lack of ECC would probably cause problems in practice, bit hand-wavey on power/space/network/manpower costs, etc). The goal of the article was to get other people to build cheap storage and put it up for rent on their network. They do have some amount of storage space available for very cheap on the network now, but personally I suspect it's people who figured "what the heck, I'll give it a try!" as opposed to people actually building storage servers and making a profit renting them out. I was honestly pretty disappointed - I'd hoped they'd found a cheap motherboard with ECC and support for port multipliers, but nope.

Dylan16807 6y ago
With the client responsible for chunking, redundancy, and error correction, I don't think the lack of ECC really matters for their use case. The rest of the issues are more important. Edit: The motherboard they picked does support ECC memory, anyway. In general ASRock models do.
- ADefenestrator 6y ago
  I haven't dug too deeply, but it's unclear whether anything but the Asrock Rack boards have full validated ECC implementations for Ryzen (vs just using the memory but ignoring ECC), and I think that may depend some on which Ryzen CPU is used (maybe PRO-only). I'd love a source of better info there, though. You're right though - since the client's doing the work and they have a lot of redundancy/diversity in the storage it's not as big of a deal for them as it would be for us. I'd be a bit wary because the client-only verification does mean that there's no verification-with-ECC step in the entire chain, but I'm not sure that's significantly worse in terms of actual risk.
justinclift 6y ago
How far off do you reckon Backblaze is from designing your own motherboards + electronics, with just the pieces you need? :)
- ADefenestrator 6y ago
  Pretty far. Since we cram so many drives into each server, our total server count is actually relatively low for the amount of storage we have. I'm not sure exactly how many units you need to amortize the design costs across to make it worth it for a custom ODM design, but I suspect it's in the tens of thousands.