3 ms·

I had a quick skim through the marketing stuff and the FAQs and didn't see anywhere that actually details what the backend of this is. I'd be curious if they'r

I had a quick skim through the marketing stuff and the FAQs and didn't see anywhere that actually details what the backend of this is. I'd be curious if they're actually using tape, older machines, Backblaze pods, etc. I guess if it's the latter, the time to recover could be an artificial barrier to prevent people from getting cute.

dabeeeenster 14y ago
I think Amazon have their own "backblaze pods"...
tommoor 14y ago
agreed, it would be great to know how this is running from a hardware point of view - just out of personal interest :-)
- freehunter 14y ago
  Someone further up mentioned a very plausible (in my experience) answer. Magnetic tape, using hard drive arrays as RAM. The wait time in this situation would be the time needed to complete all the current tasks waiting to be written/read in the queue before your data is written from tape to hard drive so you can access it.
  - flyt 14y ago
    Amazon specifically said it does not use tapes.
flyt 14y ago
It appears to use S3 as its basic backend. My guess is that S3 has been modified to have "zones" of data storage that can be allocated for Glacier. Once these zones have been filled with data (and of course that data is replicated to another region) the hard drives are spun down and essentially turned off. This is why the cost of retrieval is so high: every time they need to pull data the drives need to be spun back up (including drives holding data for people other than you), accessed, pulled from, then spun back down and put to sleep. Doing this frequently will put more wear and tear on the components and cost Amazon money in power utilization. As is Glacier should be extremely cheap for AWS to operate, regardless of the total amount of data stored with it. Beyond the initial cost of purchasing hard drives, installing, and configuring them the usual ongoing maintenance and power requirements go away.
- sintaks 14y ago
  Almost spot on. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4416065 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4416065

dabeeeenster 14y ago

I think Amazon have their own "backblaze pods"...

tommoor 14y ago

agreed, it would be great to know how this is running from a hardware point of view - just out of personal interest :-)

freehunter 14y ago
Someone further up mentioned a very plausible (in my experience) answer. Magnetic tape, using hard drive arrays as RAM. The wait time in this situation would be the time needed to complete all the current tasks waiting to be written/read in the queue before your data is written from tape to hard drive so you can access it.
- flyt 14y ago
  Amazon specifically said it does not use tapes.

flyt 14y ago

It appears to use S3 as its basic backend. My guess is that S3 has been modified to have "zones" of data storage that can be allocated for Glacier. Once these zones have been filled with data (and of course that data is replicated to another region) the hard drives are spun down and essentially turned off. This is why the cost of retrieval is so high: every time they need to pull data the drives need to be spun back up (including drives holding data for people other than you), accessed, pulled from, then spun back down and put to sleep. Doing this frequently will put more wear and tear on the components and cost Amazon money in power utilization. As is Glacier should be extremely cheap for AWS to operate, regardless of the total amount of data stored with it. Beyond the initial cost of purchasing hard drives, installing, and configuring them the usual ongoing maintenance and power requirements go away.

sintaks 14y ago
Almost spot on. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4416065 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4416065