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Build Your Own 135TB RAID6 Storage Pod For $7,384
An anonymous reader writes "Backblaze, the cloud-based backup provider, has revealed how it continues to undercut its competitors: by building its own 135TB Storage Pods which cost just $7,384 in parts. Backblaze has provided almost all of the information that you need to make your own Storage Pod, including 45 3TB hard drives, three PCIe SATA II cards, and nine backplane multipliers, but without Backblaze's proprietary management software you'll probably have to use FreeNAS, or cobble together your own software solution... A couple of years ago they showed how to make their first-generation, 67TB Storage Pods"
Here is a link to Backblaze's actual blog entry for the new pods 135TB, and here is the original 67TB pods. The blog article is actually quite fascinating. Apparently they are employee owned, use entirely off-the-shelf parts (except for the case, looks like), and recommend Hitachi drives (Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3030ALA630) as having the lowest failure rate of any manufacturer (less than 1% they say).
I found it kinda amusing that ext4's 16TB volume limit was an "issue" for them. Not because its surprising, but because... well, its 16TB. The whole blog post is actually recommended reading for anyone looking to build their own data pods like this. It really does a good job showing their personal experience in the field and problems/not problems they have. For instance: apparently heat isn't an issue, as 2 fans are able to keep an entire pod within the recommended temperature (although they actually use 6). It'll be interesting to see what happens as some of their pods get older, as I suspect that their failure rate will get pretty high fairly soon (their oldest drives are currently 4 years old, I expect when they hit 5-6 years failures will start becoming much more common.) All in all, pretty cool. Oh, and it shows how much Amazon/ Dell price gouges, but that shouldn't really shock anyone. Except the amount. A petabyte for three years is $94,000 with Backblaze, and $2,466,000 with Amazon.
P.S. I suspect they use ext4 over ZFS because ZFS, despite the built in data checks, isn't mature enough for them yet. They mention they used to use JFS before switching to ext4, so I suspect they have done some pretty extensive checking on this.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
My problem with Backblaze is their marketing is very misleading...they pit these storage pods up against cloud storage and assert that they are "cheaper", as though a storage pod is anything like cloud storage. It isn't. Sure, there's the management software issue that's already been mentioned, but they do no analysis on redundancy, power usage, security, bandwidth usage, cooling, drive replacement due to failure, administrative costs, etc. It's insulting to anyone who can tell the difference, but there are suits out there who read their marketing pitch and decide that current cloud storage providers like Google and Amazon are a rip off because "Backblaze can do the same thing for a twentieth the price!" It's nuts.
You can see this yourself in their pricing chart at the bottom of their blog post. They assert that Backblaze can store a petabyte for three years for either $56k or $94k (if you include "space and power"). And then they compare that to S3 costing roughly $2.5 million. In their old graphs, they left out the "space and power" part, and I'm sure people complained about the inaccuracies. But they're making the same mistake again this time: they're implicitly assuming the cost of replicating, say, S3, is dominated by the cost of the initial hardware. It isn't. They still haven't included the cost of geographically distributing the data across data centers, the cost of drive replacement to account for drive failure over 3 years, the cost of the bandwidth to access that data, and it is totally unclear if their cost for "power" includes cooling. And what about maintaining the data center's security? Is that included in "space"?
On a side note, I'd be interested to see their analysis on mean time between data loss using their system as it is priced in their post.
You could say the Backblaze is serving a different need, so it doesn't need to incur all those additional costs, and you might be right, but then why are they comparing it to S3 in the first place? It's just marketing fluff, and it is in an article people are lauding for its technical accuracy. Meh.