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I think the can of worms is that Backblaze themselves compared their system to more general solutions. While they were doing that for their own purpose they wer

by sh1mmer 17y ago

I think the can of worms is that Backblaze themselves compared their system to more general solutions. While they were doing that for their own purpose they weren't so explicit with that point that many people (such as GigaOM, etc) took it as a general comparison.

jacquesm 17y ago
They explicitly said that it was a storage unit/$ comparison, not throughput, not reliability.
- Andys 17y ago
  It would have helped if they'd published graphs next to it showing the same list of systems sorted by throughput and another sorted by reliability!
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    For sure. I think one of the big problems with the original article is that the fabriacator of the project did the comparison and failed to see the suggestion that was being made. Probably not on purpose, but plenty of folks ran with it thinking they could have all of 'cheap, fast, reliable'. They just got 'cheap', reliable comes at the expense of using multiple of these units and fast looks like it is going to be impossible without striping across multiple setups like this. Interesting for an extremely narrow use case (long tail storage, think backup services, video sites, photo sites). Outside of that maybe useable with some adaptation but not 'as is', besides that it is not as though their machines are up for sale, the figures they quote are mostly after all the r&d is already factored out, if you had to do this for a one-off, just cutting and folding that case would cost a pretty penny. I'm fairly sure there is a market for a device that is a more robust version of this. Probably at a 50% or so premium compared to the one they showed you could get a wider spectrum of uses and a bit more robust construction. I would have bought one three months ago, now I had to settle for 20T or so in one 4U box, for a price a little over half of what they quoted in the article.

by sh1mmer 17y ago

jacquesm 17y ago

They explicitly said that it was a storage unit/$ comparison, not throughput, not reliability.

Andys 17y ago
It would have helped if they'd published graphs next to it showing the same list of systems sorted by throughput and another sorted by reliability!
- jacquesm 17y ago
  For sure. I think one of the big problems with the original article is that the fabriacator of the project did the comparison and failed to see the suggestion that was being made. Probably not on purpose, but plenty of folks ran with it thinking they could have all of 'cheap, fast, reliable'. They just got 'cheap', reliable comes at the expense of using multiple of these units and fast looks like it is going to be impossible without striping across multiple setups like this. Interesting for an extremely narrow use case (long tail storage, think backup services, video sites, photo sites). Outside of that maybe useable with some adaptation but not 'as is', besides that it is not as though their machines are up for sale, the figures they quote are mostly after all the r&d is already factored out, if you had to do this for a one-off, just cutting and folding that case would cost a pretty penny. I'm fairly sure there is a market for a device that is a more robust version of this. Probably at a 50% or so premium compared to the one they showed you could get a wider spectrum of uses and a bit more robust construction. I would have bought one three months ago, now I had to settle for 20T or so in one 4U box, for a price a little over half of what they quoted in the article.