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Comment by budmang | Hacker News Reader

Supermicro makes good systems that are very widely used and we love that companies are continuing to work toward more dense and less costly storage systems. When we started Backblaze in 2007, all the options were astoundingly expensive.

One quick note on this particular Supermicro system - it's slightly apples/oranges as the Backblaze Storage Pod is a complete server and this Supermicro system is a JBOD, meaning it still needs to be plugged into a server to work.

Gleb, Backblaze co-founder

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As a note to this: while the above linked chassis is indeed JBOD, and one of the parent posts also mentions the 90 disk JBOD chassis, there's an intermediate option which thanks to some sort of server-geometry-tetris-magic is actually a proper machine as well as supporting 72 drives.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/?chs=417

(Disclaimer/answer to the parent post: we use the 24 drive unit for the GPU compute nodes in one of our clusters, and the 45 drive JBOD units for storage nodes in the same cluster. We have had a very positive experience with both (to the point that I got the 24 drive one as my home fileserver), as well as the Supermicro customer support for such.)

At KeepVault we've been using Supermicro since day 1 (pre-2007) and they've worked out very well. Supermicro is more expensive (on multiple metrics), but you're also getting different features like entry-level cost and power redundancy.

What happens when a Backblaze pod power-supply fails? I'd love to see a post about that. :)

David, KeepVault CEO

> What happens when a Backblaze pod power-supply fails?

From what I understand, the whole pod becomes unavailable. Which is why you would use a front-end system to have redundancy across pods.

The way I would do it myself, is set up network connections between two pods, and use DRBD, along with clustering software for the iSCSI or NAS (nfs/samba) daemons.

From an older blog, they hint at their architecture, basically storage over https -- with a little effort to make sure pods don't drop dead too easily (raid6):

http://www.backblaze.com/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-...

For replicating a similar architecture, I'd probably look at HekaFS/GlusterFS and/or CEPH.

Thanks for the reply! Yeah, this is a JBOD of course. I was thinking of their 36 drive server cases, thought one was 45 and didn't look too closely when I found the link I thought I was looking for. :)

Now that prices have come down so much on the 3rd party stuff, have you evaluated / considered using any of it?

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