I’ve been looking at the BackBlaze Pod DIY storage appliance ($2,500 for enclosure parts that can hold 45 drives), and have mixed feelings about it so far …
Positives are that it is very cheap, available today, capable of being self-supported (very important outside mainland USA), and custom-designed for BackBlaze’s requirements.
But considering the Pod for more general-purpose storage …
Hardware-wise … the combination of a desktop-model disk drive, dual but non-redundant power supplies, PCI adapters/SATA extenders and minimal mobo/non-ECC RAM makes me wonder how much more it would cost to do it right and get to a true 1.0 version.
Some kind of externally-visible drive status LED would be nice, too.
Software-wise … JFS with 13 TB volumes? I dunno … JFS would be my last choice in a linux filesystem for support reasons, and 13 TB volumes are a lot harder to manage when things go wrong than 3x 4 TB ones for backup, repair and restore.
Price-wise … although the $826,000 they mentioned for 1 PB of MD1000s is the correct website retail price for 1 TB disks today (and only $300k for refurbished units at Dell Outlet), as soon as 2 TB drives are qualified I’d estimate that the negotiated price will be around $250,000 per PB, plus servers and host adapters.
So the cost of going Dell would be about 2.5x plus additional rackspace (MD1000 is 15 disks in 3U, but not deep) and power, but you’d get redundant power supplies, server-grade hard disks, a 3-year parts warranty, SAS/SATA flexibility, ZFS-capable, software and manuals and resaleable components.
Sun’s X4540 is even more similar to the Pod, with a built-in server and 48 disk trays. Their retail pricing is about $1 per GB, but that can be negotiated down. J4400 and J4500
Perhaps commercial storage solutions would work in their budget if they did software deduping on their customer backup data?
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I emailed ProtoCase and received this quote on the case they did for BackBlaze:
Fire red (smooth semi gloss), Standard BackBlaze Silkscreen
| Quantity | Price |
| 1 – 4 | $872 |
| 5 – 9 | $812 |
| 10 – 19 | $782 |
| 20+ | $758 |
Minor Customizations are available for the following additional cost:
- Custom Color from Protocase powdercoat color list (to view, go to http://www.protocase.com/products/mcf.php#, choose ‘powdercoat’ from left menu): flat setup charge of $135 per order.
- Fully custom colors: contact us
- custom silkscreening, customer-supplied artwork: $40 setup fee, plus screen production fee of $30 per color per side
As we are a fully custom enclosure manufacturer, we can accommodate any further customization that you may require, and will quote on a custom basis. Please contact me should you wish to explore this option.
Ordering Information:
- Lead Time: ship in 2-3 days (may be increased for larger quantities or further customization)
- Shipping and applicable taxes are extra. If you would like a shipping quote as well, please supply a valid courier delivery address including phone number. Our default shipping is DHL Air but we also use UPS and FedEx.
- Prices in US dollars
- Terms: Credit Card for 1st order, net 30 terms available to repeat customers on approved credit.
Commercial Alternatives
Aberdeen, Inc. has a 8U $12,000 enclosure that can hold 48 drives. 5-year warranty.
Polywell has a 5U $20,000 system that comes with 48×2 TB drives.
Sun Storage
Supermicro 846E1
Lacie Products
Dell Storage
ION Computer (Storage)
Promise Technologies Apple Link (Endorsed by Apple to replace XServe RAID)
smallnetbuilder.com NAS Charts: average filesystem performance of NASes
Other Links
OpenFiler
Lime Networks
Nexenta
wikipedia: TLER
James Hamilton: Successfully Challenging The Server Tax
Dell XS23 Cloud Server (likely for Microsoft Azure)
theregister.co.uk: Mobile internet to eat world, apparently
theregister.co.uk: Dell servers block un-Dell HDDs
dell.com: Third-party drives not permitted on Gen 11 servers
dell.com: Why Customers Should Insist on DELL™ Hard Drives for Enterprise Systems
Thanks a lot for your review of the options. When we started building our startup, I settled on S3 as a reasonably priced storage option that let us avoid big up-front capital and operational costs for media storage. Now that we are getting closer to launch, the founder is worried about our storage costs if we have crazy success, so I’m trying to sketch out S3 alternatives, one of which is a rough estimate of what a DIY approach would cost. I’m trying to figure out what options are for the high density storage “bricks” and you’ve provided a great overview.
Now to see what options are for a suitable distributed filesystem. Tahoe is one project I’m looking at. A managed hosting service I know has been using it to provide storage as a service.
I’m also concerned about Amazon’s storage and bandwidth pricing, which is why I only recommend EC2 for batch computing at this point.
Also their lack of transparency on what hardware they use concerns me when it comes to long-term storage.
For example, I still use Yahoo! email mainly because I know they use NetApp filers for storage.
I use several Dell MD1000s with 1TB drives for mass storage now. We’ll see what the price/performance of Dell storage is once they support 2TB and 3TB drives.
I would only use a DFS that has baked-in on-site somewhere.
Which managed hosting service are you referring to?
Tahoe: A Secure Distributed Filesystem by allmydata.org