Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage

Re:Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage by blasdel on Tuesday September 01, 2009 @02:41PM (#798584)

No, they aren't going Google's route!

Google's operation has at most half the disks-per-rack density of Backblaze, but with 4 or 8 times the server density. Google does almost all their computation on the same nodes where the data is stored. Google is also storing each tablet a minimum of 3 times within each cluster, with most systems having multiple replica clusters.

Backblaze's system is going to have several orders of magnitude less bandwidth:

  way too many drives in one server (some of them on the PCI bus!)
  use of port multipliers (causing 5 drives to share one SATA cable's 300MB/s)
  RAID6 with too many drives per array (15-way XOR is no fun)
  why use JFS?
  only access is via HTTPS, not clear if SSL is done on the pod

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Re:Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage by cheriot on Tuesday September 01, 2009 @04:04PM (#798772)

I'm guessing that backups are accessed rather infrequently and that someone recovering their data won't mind a few seconds in lag time. This isn't my area of expertise, but their trade off seems sensible. It's just a different scenario than what google is dealing with.

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