6 ms·

Ok I must be missing something. Everyone is knocking this backblaze thing because it doesnt do ZFS or because it is not a "super duper high end san replacement"

Ok I must be missing something. Everyone is knocking this backblaze thing because it doesnt do ZFS or because it is not a "super duper high end san replacement" or because the components are not rated for enterprise level work. It seems to me that a company whose product is personal and small business backups does not need any of those things. They have software to do mirroring. Why would they need any fast network filesystems if all data comes and goes via the internet? Will the hard drives see that much data I/O, or will they mostly just fill up and sit idling with the very occasional read for restore (i strongly suspect the later)[1]. Of course on the other hand, there are the poeple touting it as the end all be all, a solution to kill NetApp. I guess what Im wondering is: how did so many people get the idea that this article about a specific solution to a specific problem was actually some sort of general purpose solution attacking all the big name people? What am I missing? [1]A huge chunk of this article is about the hard drives and PSUs not being enterprise ready, but for an enterprise load, but I just don't see it. I bet a lot of these boxes run idle a large chunk of the time. I have 10 year old desktop hard drives running just fine in a file server, because it has a similar load: mostly idle most of the time.

gaius 17y ago
If "doing backups" is your business, then "look how cheap our kit is!" probably isn't the best marketing strategy. A "small business" is someone's bread-and-butter, they don't care that their backup needs aren't sexy to storage geeks.
- sophacles 17y ago
  I dunno, it made me consider them. Instead of "we spend $2m on storage, and someday to hope to make enough money from people like you to not go out of business", its "look we aren't charging you much, and we are promising you 50 yrs of storage, this is how we can actually do that and stay in business".
  - sho 17y ago
    I agree. Do you remember a company called Bandwagon? http://ridethebandwagon.com/ http://ridethebandwagon.com/ They had a big splash a couple of years ago about how they were going to offer unlimited backup for all your mp3s in iTunes, all nicely and automatically synced, for about $10/month or something. They were going to do the storage on S3. They offered anyone who mentioned them on their blog a free years' service. http://blog.ridethebandwagon.com/post/37269480/free-accounts-for-bloggers http://blog.ridethebandwagon.com/post/37269480/free-accounts... I had about 400G of mp3s at the time I think. I thought, "OK!" Their service lasted about 2 days as they underestimated, seemingly by about an order of magnitude, how much data people actually had. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/02/adverse_selecti.html http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/02/adverse_selecti.html Then they went back to the drawing board and came up with some lame service where you buy the storage space on S3 yourself and then they sell you the ability to access it or something. Lucky they didn't go out of business. Anyway, knowing the details of the kind of system Backblaze is using, and the price per gig it breaks down to for them, is evidence they're not overselling themselves, and gives me confidence that they'll still actually be there in a few years, unlike Bandwagon. I'm much more likely to use them because of that. Add in all the discussion they've generated, and it's been a very clever marketing event for them. Kudos!
uibuibk 17y ago
Exactly - this is a replacement for a tape library, not a database server.
- jrg 17y ago
  Indeed. It would be nice to see some comparisons to the architectures (and, as everyone seems to care so much, prices) in the various 'VTLs' sold by the likes of Falconstor, HP, EMC, and StorageTek/Sun!
rbanffy 17y ago
"how did so many people get the idea that this article about a specific solution to a specific problem was actually some sort of general purpose solution attacking all the big name people?" Backblaze did it, They did it when they decided to put this graph in the article: http://blog.backblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/cost-of-a-petabyte-chart.jpg http://blog.backblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/cost-of... It's an apples to oranges comparison.
- russss 17y ago
  Well no, it's not an apples to oranges comparison because no hardware vendors offer a solution which is comparable to the one Backblaze have devised. That graph is simply comparing their solution to the closest commercial equivalents. It just so happens that these are all way off because all hardware manufacturers want to design their hardware to provide the highest throughput. (That said, our experience with the Sun X4500s hasn't been great from an I/O point of view.)
  - Periodic 17y ago
    It is an apples to oranges comparison because Blackblaze is only including the cost of components in that graph for their solution, but they're including all of the research, development, assembly, and support costs in the other vendors' solutions. What are the labor costs for testing all their hardware (with 10 sata controllers no less)? What are the labor costs for assembling all those systems? What is the labor costs of developing the system architecture? What are the labor costs of creating their storage application which reduces their need for in-box redundancy? And if you want to talk about Amazon there is data center rental, power, cooling, and ongoing administration. In short, they're comparing the costs of their components to the costs of a ready-to-go solution from other vendors. Sounds like apples and oranges to me.
    - easp 17y ago
      They did invite these criticisms by drawing comparisons to S3, EMC, etc. However, they already tried to factor out the cost of operations so that s3 was on equal footing with the non-service offerings. We can quibble about the specific numbers they used, but I think the bigger quibble is that by their own estimates, those costs are substantial, seemingly far outstripping their hardware costs by something like an order of magnitude. Even so, at the scale of a pentabyte or more, the savings are substantial enough to be worth addressing. As for the missing costs that you cite, think this through. What do you really think the per-unit costs for assembly and testing are? Even if each unit required a couple of man-days, the costs would probably only add ~10% or so per unit. The other costs you cite for the initial hardware and software engineering are fixed costs, the same whether they are storing 1PB or 1,000. Also, if they did their job right, much of the per-unit testing cost should be mitigated by the overall systems design. The system management automation can do a test cycle on new nodes before promoting them to production use, and of course, failures should be dealt with automatically.
fauigerzigerk 17y ago
The answer to your question is in the price comparisons that Backblaze provides. If you compare the price of something you imply that it fills the same or similar needs. Since there is no explicit caveat, and they don't explain why their solution is so much cheaper, competitors will come out and provide that explanation for them. I'm pretty sure that the Backblaze solution is actually cheaper and that they are cutting some of the right corners for their particular application scenario. But it remains an open question how much cheaper it ends up being. I think their price comparison is a bit misleading since it doesn't include replacement costs for the desktop grade hard disks they use and it doesn't include any of the costs incurred by the software/labor/maintainance required to make this a reliable backup solution.
- mmt 17y ago
  desktop grade hard disks I believe the data dispel this marketing myth. http://usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/index.html http://usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_htm... http://usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/full_papers/pinheiro/pinheiro_html/index.html http://usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/full_papers/pinheiro/pi...
  - ciupicri 17y ago
    Interesting papers, but based on what I've skimmed and remember I don't think that they compare desktop grade disks with server grade disks.
    - mmt 17y ago
      Given the length of history, they do, in effect, by comparing disks with server-grade interfaces (e.g. SCSI) with desktop-grade interfaces (e.g. IDE).

gaius 17y ago

If "doing backups" is your business, then "look how cheap our kit is!" probably isn't the best marketing strategy. A "small business" is someone's bread-and-butter, they don't care that their backup needs aren't sexy to storage geeks.

sophacles 17y ago
I dunno, it made me consider them. Instead of "we spend $2m on storage, and someday to hope to make enough money from people like you to not go out of business", its "look we aren't charging you much, and we are promising you 50 yrs of storage, this is how we can actually do that and stay in business".
- sho 17y ago
  I agree. Do you remember a company called Bandwagon? http://ridethebandwagon.com/ http://ridethebandwagon.com/ They had a big splash a couple of years ago about how they were going to offer unlimited backup for all your mp3s in iTunes, all nicely and automatically synced, for about $10/month or something. They were going to do the storage on S3. They offered anyone who mentioned them on their blog a free years' service. http://blog.ridethebandwagon.com/post/37269480/free-accounts-for-bloggers http://blog.ridethebandwagon.com/post/37269480/free-accounts... I had about 400G of mp3s at the time I think. I thought, "OK!" Their service lasted about 2 days as they underestimated, seemingly by about an order of magnitude, how much data people actually had. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/02/adverse_selecti.html http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/02/adverse_selecti.html Then they went back to the drawing board and came up with some lame service where you buy the storage space on S3 yourself and then they sell you the ability to access it or something. Lucky they didn't go out of business. Anyway, knowing the details of the kind of system Backblaze is using, and the price per gig it breaks down to for them, is evidence they're not overselling themselves, and gives me confidence that they'll still actually be there in a few years, unlike Bandwagon. I'm much more likely to use them because of that. Add in all the discussion they've generated, and it's been a very clever marketing event for them. Kudos!

uibuibk 17y ago

Exactly - this is a replacement for a tape library, not a database server.

jrg 17y ago
Indeed. It would be nice to see some comparisons to the architectures (and, as everyone seems to care so much, prices) in the various 'VTLs' sold by the likes of Falconstor, HP, EMC, and StorageTek/Sun!

rbanffy 17y ago

"how did so many people get the idea that this article about a specific solution to a specific problem was actually some sort of general purpose solution attacking all the big name people?" Backblaze did it, They did it when they decided to put this graph in the article: http://blog.backblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/cost-of-a-petabyte-chart.jpg http://blog.backblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/cost-of... It's an apples to oranges comparison.

russss 17y ago
Well no, it's not an apples to oranges comparison because no hardware vendors offer a solution which is comparable to the one Backblaze have devised. That graph is simply comparing their solution to the closest commercial equivalents. It just so happens that these are all way off because all hardware manufacturers want to design their hardware to provide the highest throughput. (That said, our experience with the Sun X4500s hasn't been great from an I/O point of view.)
- Periodic 17y ago
  It is an apples to oranges comparison because Blackblaze is only including the cost of components in that graph for their solution, but they're including all of the research, development, assembly, and support costs in the other vendors' solutions. What are the labor costs for testing all their hardware (with 10 sata controllers no less)? What are the labor costs for assembling all those systems? What is the labor costs of developing the system architecture? What are the labor costs of creating their storage application which reduces their need for in-box redundancy? And if you want to talk about Amazon there is data center rental, power, cooling, and ongoing administration. In short, they're comparing the costs of their components to the costs of a ready-to-go solution from other vendors. Sounds like apples and oranges to me.
  - easp 17y ago
    They did invite these criticisms by drawing comparisons to S3, EMC, etc. However, they already tried to factor out the cost of operations so that s3 was on equal footing with the non-service offerings. We can quibble about the specific numbers they used, but I think the bigger quibble is that by their own estimates, those costs are substantial, seemingly far outstripping their hardware costs by something like an order of magnitude. Even so, at the scale of a pentabyte or more, the savings are substantial enough to be worth addressing. As for the missing costs that you cite, think this through. What do you really think the per-unit costs for assembly and testing are? Even if each unit required a couple of man-days, the costs would probably only add ~10% or so per unit. The other costs you cite for the initial hardware and software engineering are fixed costs, the same whether they are storing 1PB or 1,000. Also, if they did their job right, much of the per-unit testing cost should be mitigated by the overall systems design. The system management automation can do a test cycle on new nodes before promoting them to production use, and of course, failures should be dealt with automatically.

fauigerzigerk 17y ago

The answer to your question is in the price comparisons that Backblaze provides. If you compare the price of something you imply that it fills the same or similar needs. Since there is no explicit caveat, and they don't explain why their solution is so much cheaper, competitors will come out and provide that explanation for them. I'm pretty sure that the Backblaze solution is actually cheaper and that they are cutting some of the right corners for their particular application scenario. But it remains an open question how much cheaper it ends up being. I think their price comparison is a bit misleading since it doesn't include replacement costs for the desktop grade hard disks they use and it doesn't include any of the costs incurred by the software/labor/maintainance required to make this a reliable backup solution.

mmt 17y ago
desktop grade hard disks I believe the data dispel this marketing myth. http://usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/index.html http://usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_htm... http://usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/full_papers/pinheiro/pinheiro_html/index.html http://usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/full_papers/pinheiro/pi...
- ciupicri 17y ago
  Interesting papers, but based on what I've skimmed and remember I don't think that they compare desktop grade disks with server grade disks.
  - mmt 17y ago
    Given the length of history, they do, in effect, by comparing disks with server-grade interfaces (e.g. SCSI) with desktop-grade interfaces (e.g. IDE).