[Discuss] Storage question follow-up

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 01:05:55PM -0500, Bill Bogstad wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 12:34 PM, Peter Jalajas <pjalajas at tebuco.com> wrote:
> 
> You might consider going to one big honking file server (on the
> cheap).   BackBlaze has open sourced
> their hardware designs for massive systems into which you can install
> your own drives.   They just announced a third iteration of the design
> that holds 45 drives.  Their claim is that they build such a system
> for about $2000 (in quantity with no drives).   Your price would
> probably be higher, but probably no more then 50% more.    It sounds
> like you could pull the SATA drives out of all your old equipment and
> just plug them into a single filer server.   Going forward you could
> swap out low density with higher density drives as they become
> available.   Current max capacity (with 4 TB drives) is 180 Petabytes.
>   That's close to 50 million 4GByte video files.   Here's their blog
> entry about it:
> 
> http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/02/20/180tb-of-good-vibrations-storage-pod-3-0/

Note that backblaze does all their redundancy on a cross-pod
basis, not inside a pod. Their model is that any pod can fail
without disturbing the overall system. As a result, they don't
do hotswap or RAID, and they don't care much about performance.

If that is not Peter's model, it's not going to work for him.

-dsr-