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Build Your Own $2.8M Petabyte Disk Array For $117k
Chris Pirazzi writes "Online backup startup BackBlaze, disgusted with the outrageously overpriced offerings from EMC, NetApp and the like, has released an open-source hardware design showing you how to build a 4U, RAID-capable, rack-mounted, Linux-based server using commodity parts that contains 67 terabytes of storage at a material cost of $7,867. This works out to roughly $117,000 per petabyte, which would cost you around $2.8 million from Amazon or EMC. They have a full parts list and diagrams showing how they put everything together. Their blog states: 'Our hope is that by sharing, others can benefit and, ultimately, refine this concept and send improvements back to us.'"
where's the extensive stuff that sun (I work at sun, btw; related to storage) and others have for management? voltages, fan-flow, temperature points at various places inside the chassis, an 'ok to remove' led and button for the drives, redundant power supplies that hot-swap and drives that truly hot-swap (including presence sensors in drive bays). none of that is here. and these days, sas is the preferred drive tech for mission critical apps. very few customers use sata for anything 'real' (it seems, even though I personally like sata).
this is not enterprise quality no matter what this guy says.
there's a reason you pay a lot more for enterprise vendor solutions.
personally, I have a linux box at home running jfs and raid5 with hotswap drive trays. but I don't fool myself into thinking its BETTER than sun, hp, ibm and so on.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Depends on how it works. Hopefully (or ideally) it's more like the google approach - build it to maintain data redundancy, initially with X% overcapacity. As disks fail, what do you do then? Nothing. When it gets down to 80% or so of original capacity (or however much redundancy you designed in), you chuck it and buy a new one. By then the tech is outdated anyways.
Are you saying that with the more expensive system, disks never fail and nobody ever has to get up in the night?
Well... yes and no. When you've worked with high-end arrays, you learn that storage is only the beginning. NetApp and EMC provide far, far more. I was damned impressed when I first heard a presentation from NetApp about their technology, but the day that they called me up and told me that the replacement disk was in the mail and I answered, "I had a failure?" ... that was the day that I understood what data reliability was all about.
Since that time (over 10 years ago), the state of the art has improved over and over again. If you're buying a petabyte of storage, it's because you have a need that breaks most basic storage models, and the average sysadmin who thinks that storage is cheap is going to go through a lot of pain learning that he's wrong.
Someday, you'll have a petabyte disk in a 3.5" form-factor. At that point, you can treat it as a commodity. Until then, there are demands placed on you when you administrate that much storage which demand a very different class of device than a Linux box with a bunch of raid cards.
As evidence of that, I submit that dozens of companies like the one in this article have existed over the years, and only a handful of them still exist. Those that still do have either exited the storage array business, or have evolved their offerings into something that costs a lot more to build and support than a pile of disks.