3 ms·
Well, to be fair, Backblaze is using consumer-grade hardware here. No redundant PSUs. No mirrored OS drives. Cheaper components. Etc. They're going Google's ro
by spydez 17y ago
Well, to be fair, Backblaze is using consumer-grade hardware here. No redundant PSUs. No mirrored OS drives. Cheaper components. Etc.
They're going Google's route, which is fine, it's just... a whole different direction than a Sun Thumper. I'd be interested to see how their costs per petabyte stack against Google's.
- blasdel 17y agoNo, they aren't going Google's route! Google's operation has at most half the disks-per-rack density of Backblaze, but with 4 or 8 times the server density. Google does almost all their computation on the same nodes where the data is stored. Google is also storing each tablet a minimum of 3 times within each cluster, with most systems having multiple replica clusters. Backblaze's system is going to have several orders of magnitude less bandwidth: way too many drives in one server (some of them on the PCI bus!) use of port multipliers (causing 5 drives to share one SATA cable's 300MB/s) RAID6 with too many drives per array (15-way XOR is no fun) why use JFS? only access is via HTTPS, not clear if SSL is done on the pod
- cheriot 17y agoI'm guessing that backups are accessed rather infrequently and that someone recovering their data won't mind a few seconds in lag time. This isn't my area of expertise, but their trade off seems sensible. It's just a different scenario than what google is dealing with.