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180TB of Good Vibrations – Storage Pod 3.0
- purephase 14y agoThat's a pretty impressive price point.
- digitalzombie 14y agoI wish they support linux
- alexkus 14y agoEh? What makes you think it doesn't already?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Shish2k 14y agoTheir website? "Backup Windows and Mac Backblaze backs up Windows XP 32-bit, Windows Vista 32-bit and 64-bit, Windows 7 32-bit and 64-bit, Windows 8 and Intel-based Mac OSX 10.5 and newer."
- heldrida 14y agoThey state they don't in the FAQ. What makes you think they do ?
- astrodust 14y agoThe pod itself does but the BackBlaze client software for the BackBlaze service does not.
- alexkus 14y agoSorry, yes, I was thinking about support in relation to the pod itself (the subject of this article) and not BackBlaze in general.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- rsync 14y agoIf only there was a unix-oriented backup provider with bulk pricing lower than S3, 12 years of history, and a public, aggressive stance on privacy and civil liberties. Oh, if only such a provider existed. (rsync.net)
- druiid 14y agoYeah, but your standard costs for not crazy huge amounts of data aren't as competitive as I've been able to find. We're storing on a competitor for about half what you guys charge and they provide rsync/ssh access.
- fr0sty 14y agoCare to name names? Inquiring minds, and all that...
- druiid 14y agoStrongspace at http://www.strongspace.com/ http://www.strongspace.com/ Interestingly they use ZFS on FreeBSD I believe.
- rsync 14y agoI wouldn't say this in most places, but always, always email us about your data sizes and needs. There's usually a way to make the pricing work if you are both: - technically competent - have smaller space needs
- mamcx 14y agoI'm building a service to be on top of rsync.net -so far-, and the only problem is the lack of a admin API to automate everything. In the plus side, the guys answer emails (faster and better than azure and s3, IMHO).
- dublinben 14y agoI'm pretty sure that Crashplan+ is the nearly same price, and they definitely support Linux.
- johnmwilliams 14y agoI am curious where they purchase 4TB disk for $195. That is less than half of most places. That's quite a price break, even if buying in bulk.
- danso 14y agoSeagate 4GB external drive is selling for $180 right now: http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Backup-Desktop-External-STCA4000100/dp/B00829THLE/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1361379018&sr=8-2&keywords=4tb+drive http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Backup-Desktop-External-STCA40... Yes, probably not same speed specs, but it's external, which means it usually costs more for the convenience of the housing. Edit: Unless my math is wrong, the 3GB model is a better price point...$40 for a TB as opposed to $44+/TB for the 4TB version. http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Backup-Desktop-External-STCA3000101/dp/B00829THQE/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1361379272&sr=8-8&keywords=4tb+drive http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Backup-Desktop-External-STCA30...
- e1ven 14y agoSadly, the ones in external cases are cheaper these days, since they're targeted differently. ;( Take a look at http://blog.backblaze.com/2012/10/09/backblaze_drive_farming/ http://blog.backblaze.com/2012/10/09/backblaze_drive_farming... If you're not afraid of shucking cases, there are a number of 4TB drives you can get at that pricepoint- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178111 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145596 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236385 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236...
- EwanToo 14y agoBackblaze do say the price per TB for 3TB drives is better, but obviously you can squeeze more TB per 4U case when you use 4TB drives. That cuts down on the power usage, cooling, and rack space that you need to pay for.
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- andrewcooke 14y agowhoa. 2.5" (boot) drives more reliable than 3.5". why?!
- yardie 14y agoRotational velocity for one. I surmise that 2.5" drives are less affected by vibration. I'm surprised they don't use a SDCard as the boot drive. I run our ESX servers from them.
- moe 14y agoI wonder why they use a boot-drive at all instead of netbooting these things (or use a pair of USB-sticks).
- brianwski 14y agoDisclaimer: I work at Backblaze. We use the boot drive just because it's a tiny bit "cleaner" to boot off a separate drive (and configure swap on that drive) and have all the "data" alone on the 45 drive array. It allows you to boot and THEN reassemble a failed raid array that is on other drives, stuff like that. You could do it off of USB sticks, but I'm not sure about how well that would work with swapping? Maybe it would be fine? In the end it hasn't been worth focusing on yet, the price difference would be really super small. We spend most of our brain cells trying to find cheaper hard drives which account for 80 percent of our costs. Netbooting -> we're actively looking into that as an option. But you still probably need a local swap drive.
- moe 14y agoYou don't normally need a swap-drive on a storage node (if it needs to swap then something is wrong to begin with), but of course I don't know the details of what your nodes may do beyond dealing out files. The main advantage of PXE-booting would be maintainability (rolling out upgrades by a simple reboot, etc.) but I assume at your scale you have that already figured out in one way or another. Either way, thank you for all the insights that you keep sharing with the public! These hands-on blog posts are priceless both in entertainment and education value. :-)
- craigyk 14y agoI bought a used HP MDS 600 on EBay for less $2000 shipped. It doesn't have a computer built in, but unlike the Backblaze it has four power supplies, two redundant and four fans and two SAS interfaces. It also holds 70 drives. I've thought of building a Backblaze before, but if you want to meet your storage needs with a single enclosure, there are better solutions for the money. The Storage Pod is really for when you have enough of them to consider any single one redundant.
- jacquesm 14y agoObviously a one-off is always going to be source-able from second hand bits and pieces. But if you need to build a these on a regular basis and you need to maintain them then uniformity and slightly higher cost are not an issue. Nice deal though!
- vardump 14y agoI think it should use ECC memory and an i3-CPU that supports it. Random memory bit flips in are going to corrupt data at a steady pace. Intel i3 processors that support ECC: http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced/?s=t&FamilyText=2nd%20Generation%20Intel%C2%AE%20Core%E2%84%A2%20i3%20Processors&ECCMemory=true http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced/?s=t&FamilyText=2nd... Also, it'd be interesting to hear why Backblaze doesn't use SuperMicro SAS-boards instead with a SAS-expander, like HP SAS Expander.
- brianwski 14y agoDisclaimer: I work at Backblaze. The answer to pretty much any question is "sort by price". :-) The SAS-expanders are just a tiny bit more expensive, or at least they were the last time we checked. We were worried early on that many other designs seemed to prefer the expanders vs the port multipliers, but in all the years over 450 pods we've never seen the port multipliers give us any problems. Maybe they aren't as fast as the SAS expanders? But that isn't our current bottleneck so it wouldn't help us at all.
- jacquesm 14y agoMore worried about the lack of ECC. Have you done tests on (normally) undetected errors?
- brianwski 14y agoOh, about the "random memory flips" -> in our particular application, the client running on a customer's laptop encrypts the data then calculates a SHA-1 checksum THEN transmits the file through HTTPS to the pods. The pods write it to disk with the checksum there. Once every couple of weeks we re-read the file and re-calculate the SHA-1 checksums. If there was ever a problem, we would detect it. These turn out to be VERY rare, but they do happen where a file is fine for many years then a bit is flipped "on disk" (we don't think they are in the RAM, but it doesn't matter, it is an "end-to-end" check). We assume this is happening in consumer systems also, but at the rates we see it would be undetectable in consumer's worlds (1 bit per customer lifetime - it would probably create a tiny mis-spelling in a MS Word document, or maybe one pixel would be wrong in one JPEG).
- recuter 14y ago"Our monthly cost for a full rack of Storage Pods with 3 TB drives is $0.63 per TB, while a full rack of Storage Pods with 4 TB drives is $0.47 per TB. " Interesting coincidence, 180TB of Google Storage comes out at $8560 per month which is $47.55 per TB. Almost exactly x100. https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/pricingandterms https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/pricingandterms And that does not include the network cost.
- budmang 14y agoWell either they're making 99% gross margin, or perhaps they need a few Backblaze Storage Pods.
- EwanToo 14y agoThe very high gross margin is more likely - they're charging as much as they can, not as little as they can.
- spartango 14y agoGoogle Storage (or Amazon S3) have multi-rack and even multi-room redundancy that the Backblaze setup does not at the quoted price. And that doesn't account for the costs of managing and administering those machines, nor replacing dead disks and machines when they do fail. I expect that you'll generally find that Google or AWS more pricey than a DIY-setup, partly because of hidden costs and partly because they are actually trying to make money off of their services, even if the margins aren't outrageous.
- tobiasu 14y agoUnrelated, from their FAQ: "Look, I'm an Advanced User, and I Already Have a Set of RAID Drives with Perl Scripts to Copy My Files Back and Forth Between My 18 Home Machines that are in a Datacenter I've Built in My Closet. Why Do I Need Backblaze?" Made me smile, probably because I have more machines than m^2 in my apartment...
- joshAg 14y agoAnd yet they don't have a *nix client...
- kyrra 14y agoThe serviceability of those things looks not pleasant. I used to work in the storage industry and got to play with (what is now) NetApp high-density setups [1]. 60 drives in a 4U setup, compared to 45 drives in Storage Pod in the same 4U. But I'm guessing the cost is where Storage Pod really wins out. NetApp gear, even as a JBOD, is really expensive. The NetApp box has same type of padding for all the drives, but they are much easier to access (pull out trays are stable and easy to use). Fun issues I saw with the NetApp box (at least 3 years ago): fully loaded with drives, it went over the weight limit that Fedex or UPS would ship with standard shipping. It required freight shipping to ship a single, full-loaded, E5400. [1] http://www.netapp.com/us/products/storage-systems/e5400/ http://www.netapp.com/us/products/storage-systems/e5400/
- vnchr 14y agoStorage hardware startup here. We can do 72 drives in 4U for standard racks and 120 drives in 4U for deep racks, but it is difficult to service so we're only pushing to early adopters. However high-density servicability can be addressed. Our next system should have same drive numbers in 5U, much easier to swap drives. Not much can be done about the shipping problem, ha ha.
- bcantrill 14y agoI think it's worth (re)reading this comment on the original Storage Pod from several years ago: http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/5899-Some-perspective-to-this-DIY-storage-server-mentioned-at-Storagemojo.html http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/5899-Some-perspective-to-th... I have essentially have all of the same questions for Storage Pod 3.0 -- and in particular, what does the software stack look like? (This config is absolutely begging for ZFS, but I have a haunting feeling that something janky is afoot upstack.) I would also be curious as to the specific nature of failures that have been seen with the deployed architecture. Have the concerns from three years ago proven to be alarmist or prescient? That said: I think it's very valuable to get configs like this out there for public discussion -- and I think it might be inspiring us (Joyent) to similarly publicly discuss our own high density storage config...
- BryantD 14y agoI'd love to see more discussions of high density storage config. Perspective is good.
- brianwski 14y agoDisclaimer: I work for Backblaze. I also liked what James Hamilton (VP in Amazon Web Services) had to say: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/09/03/SuccessfullyChallengingTheServerTax.aspx http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/09/03/SuccessfullyChal...
- wmf 14y agoAll those criticisms look pretty irrelevant in Backblaze's scale-out cold storage use case. Their performance requirements are essentially zero. They already handle full pod failures, so a partial failure is no worse as long as they can recognize it and fail the whole pod. Having said that, it is interesting to compare Backblaze's design to Facebook's Open Vault. Facebook's design has much better mechanical serviceability, redundant power supplies, and redundant SAS expanders. Facebook believes that they can afford such features even for cold storage, so why is Backblaze cutting even more corners?
- brianwski 14y ago
- Keyframe 14y agoI'm interested in maybe having a couple of those boxes for video data, to keep it online for editing bays. What would be the best solution to backup that amount of data - redundant boxes?
- beernutz 14y agoYes, redundant boxes would probably be the best bet for data of that size. Remember though, raid is NOT a backup. When possible make sure to send copies to multiple places!
- rdl 14y agoI wonder when the Hitachi 7K4000 4TB 7200rpm drives will hit $150 in quantity 100 or less. I think they were $180 on Black Friday 2012, and $210 recently.
- shocks 14y agoIt's crazy that hard drive prices are still higher than they were two years ago because of the flooding...
- hisyam 14y agoSupply and demand.
- atYevP 14y agoIt's not THAT crazy, the drive manufacturers saw demand stay constant while supply dwindled, there response was to raise prices across the board. They really have no need to drop them again, as quickly as they had been before the flooding. As soon as the first major producer drops prices back to normal levels the others will follow suite, but no one wants to be the first, since people are still buying them at inflated prices.
- shocks 14y agoI understand the law of supply and demand, I am merely expressing surprise that the effect has lasted for over two years. :)
- ChuckMcM 14y agoI love a good storage story. Its interesting that they still put them behind a couple of gigabit network ports. Using the native network (2 x 1GbE) it would take more than a week with those interfaces on full dump to get a full load off or on to a pod. I had an ultimately unrewarding conversation with Sean Quinlan (of Google GFS fame) about the futility of putting a lot of storage behind such a small channel (in Google's case the numbers were epicly Google of course but the argument was the same). You waste all of the spindles because the operation rate (requests coming into the channel) vs the amount of data ops needed to satisfy the request, basically leave your disks waiting around the next request to come in from the network. (btw that allows you to make a nearly perfect emission rate scheduler for disk arms but that is another story). What this means is that petabyte pods are going to be nearly useless, although with an external index they can be dense.
- mikeash 14y agoI could see it being a problem for Google, but Backblaze wants these for archival purposes, not something where there is going to be a lot of reading and writing. The write rate is going to be whatever speed their users upload stuff, divided by the total number of their storage pods. I assume this is relatively small. The read rate is going to be whatever speed their users download restores, divided by the total number of storage pods, which is probably much smaller still. The assumption here is that data is kept for a long time relative to how frequently it's written and read, so the IO speed probably isn't that big of a deal.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoI agree, as big tape drives these things are pretty cool.
- donavanm 14y agoNo. As you said port speed doesn't matter for data at rest. What matters is ingest/exfil of data due to "exceptional" conditions. Prime cases are cluster/mirror failure. Remirroring existing data to another pod is port limited, as is ingest for pods that are remirror targets.
- gadders 14y agoBased on not much other than their blog postings, I really like the (for want of a better word) vibe of this company.
- Serow225 14y agoDisclaimer: I work at a company that makes hard drives. Don't forget about their sensitivity to rotational vibration, most often induced by coupling from other drives. Maybe it's not important in this particular application, but it can be a performance killer. To avoid it, 'vibration absorption' is not always the name of the game :) This link has some good background info, and a reminder that there are actual hardware/firmware reasons why enterprise & near-line drives are more expensive than consumer drives: http://enterprise.media.seagate.com/2010/05/inside-it-storage/are-all-hard-drives-created-equal-examining-rotational-vibration-in-desktop-vs-enterprise/ http://enterprise.media.seagate.com/2010/05/inside-it-storag...
- mctx 14y agoIt sounds like they've got enough redundancy that a single drive failure (or even an entire pod) isn't an issue - they use cheap drives and simply swap them out when they fail. I wish Google's hard drive failure analysis [1] included failure rates and failure scenario statistics for different models, vendors and consumer/enterprise classes too. [1] http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf
- Serow225 14y agoKnowing Google, I'm pretty sure that their drive population was consumer-grade - I think they mentioned that in the paper. It was interesting that the paper lamented the usefulness of SMART in predicting failures, because one of the things that enterprise/nearline drives buy you is much much richer SMART diagnostics. I wonder what their results would have been with drives that had better diagnostic reporting. I'm also curious if folks that are building 'cold-storage' on the cheap have looked into using DVR drives, they might have some useful characteristics for this application.
- venomsnake 14y agoIsn't the "use same drives" advice a little dangerous? If you have bad luck with firmware or specific batch of drives - you could be put in a world of pain fast.
- atYevP 14y agoYev w/ Backblaze here -> This is true, and we've had bad batches before, but all of the drives and chassis are tested before we put them in to production, having arrays with the same drives minimizes the variables throughout the pod.