[Discuss] Storage question follow-up

[feenberg at nber.org (Daniel Feenberg)]

A very nice treatment of the pros and cons of the backblaze pod
is given by the Bioteam at

   http://bioteam.net/tag/backblaze/

While the pods are not for every use, it is important not to make the
usual mistakes of newsgroup postings:

   1) If A is better than B, then B is no good.
   2) If it doesn't solve my problem, then no one else
      should use it either.

The Bioteam's series of postings would be very helpful to anyone
building a pod if it should turn out to be what they do need.

dan feenberg

On Fri, 22 Feb 2013, Bill Bogstad wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 1:08 PM, Dan Ritter <dsr at randomstring.org> wrote:
>> On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 01:05:55PM -0500, Bill Bogstad wrote:
>>>   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.
>
> It does look like BackBlaze's  hardware probably doesn't do hotswap.
> However, even if they don't use it, he could always do software RAID.
> In fact, it sounds like they use software RAID6 with LVM.   Or at
> least they did the in the second iteration of their storage pods:
>
> http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/
>
> As for performance, I seem to recall that last night Peter said that
> once a file is "in place"; it doesn't move around very much.  So
> performance doesn't sound like the primary issue.
>
> Bill Bogstad
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