Build your own cloud storage system
A SMALL computer network outfit says that it can make a huge Petabyte sized data storage machine for just $117,000.
Backblaze said that the outrageous prices charged by the big companies for data storage are just money for old rope and it can provide its customers with unlimited cloud storage for only $5 per month.
According to the company's blog it decided to build its own custom Backblaze Storage Pods, which are 67 terabyte 4U servers, for $7,867 each.
It is showing punters how to build its gear and it does look like massive data storage capacity can be had for a few thousand dollars.
Backblaze worked out that most of the technology used in storage servers is the same and that people were paying more than ten times the cost of the hardware for just a badge on the box.
It quotes five major systems vendors' prices for Petabyte storage configurations, ranging from Dell at $826,000 to EMC at $2,860,000. Apparently there are huge margins to had in flogging large storage kit.
Each of the Backblaze Storage Pods is a self-contained unit. It's a 4U custom metal rackmount case with an Intel motherboard and four SATA cards in it. Nine SATA cables run from the cards to nine port-multiplier backplanes that each have five hard drives plugged directly into them. This provides 45 hard drives in total. Three groups of 15 hard drives are each combined into a single RAID6 volume with two parity drives.
There are two power supplies in the box because 45 drives draw a lot of 5V power, yet high wattage ATX PSUs provide most of their power on the 12V rail. PSU1 powers the front three fans and port multiplier backplanes 1,2,3,4, and 7. PSU2 powers everything else. When running, the entire storage unit draws approximately 4.8 amps idle and up to 5.6 amps under heavy load.
The Storage Pods run a 64-bit Debian 4 Linux and use the JFS file system. They are self-contained appliances, where all access to the units is through HTTPS. It all apparently works and does not need iSCSI, NFS, SQL, SAN, NAS, Fibre Channel or anything else terribly fancy.
Turns out that monstrous data storage capacity can be built on the cheap. µ
Share this:
ShareBusiness Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
They're building this cluster out of cheap, consumer level hardware. Who in their right mind does that with a production server?
Just looking at the hard drive reviews on Newegg people list them as having random problems in RAID configurations.
No thanks. If I'm storing that much data (and presumably it is important data), I'm not going to trust it to some Newegg door buster - free shipping special.
This system might be the best thing for their particular business. However, it has very poor reliability at the pod level - No redundant anything - and low performance. Is that a bad thing? No. Does that line up to a lot of customers in the external space? No.
Also, I found no mention in the article about how much they spent to design the box. That counts in the overall cost of the system.
The title of this article and the article it uses as it source is clearly a misnomer.
This isn't a cloud storage solution, its a box with a crap ton of storage, that's all. Is it cheap? Yes. Will it function as a cloud storage? Probably as long as you like all your eggs in on basket.
The important part of the puzzle is the replication and storage methodology that actually handles where the data goes. Obviously that is proprietary and I wouldn't expect them to give it away, but this is just a storage node with a bunch of drives.
I'll take buzz word bingo for $500 Alex.
Over 5 years, you'd spend more time and money at that scale moving from pod to pod replacing sata drives that fail and then degraded performance during rebuilds.
There were two independent large-scale studies of hard-drive failures done a few years ago. Among their common conclusions was that there was no significant difference in reliability between “enterprise-grade” and “consumer-grade” hard drives.
Also, notice they’re using Linux software RAID. That helps to keep the complexity down and the reliability up.
lol you can build the same if you use 666 1.5 Terabyte drives at $97.99 each (cheapest off of newegg) which brings you to a total of $65326.67!! Throw in some money for some chassis and ghetto wiring and I'm sure you can build your own petabyte server for much less!! hahaha
If Google can build the worlds largest clustered computing environment out of garbage, you can build enough redundancy into hardware this cheap to have your cake and not pay as much for it.
You could even mirror these appliances for total redundancy way less than the cost of most large tier storage solutions.
Besides, just because something says "HP" doesn't mean it's not garbage. It often is; it's just well supported garbage.