budmang

Links? We love getting feedback, especially if we're overpaying for a particular component?

Gleb

Excellent analysis. There are some other costs involved (bandwidth, switches/cabinets, non-pod servers, etc.), but pods & drives dominate the costs, so your math is good.

You're also right that 1 TB is the approximate breakeven between Backblaze per-GB cloud storage & unlimited online backup by cost and most people are below that. However, the main reason for people to use the backup service is that we take care of all the backup functions (encryption, dedup, compression, restores, etc.)

> Please excuse me while I buy stock in Amazon/Box/Dropbox/Backblaze/etc....

Alas, Backblaze stock isn't yet available for sale ;-)

BTW, thanks for being a customer!

Gleb

Not trying to align with any movement. Just saying that we give the design away. Appreciate all the feedback and we'll re-look at adding a license.

To be clear on our philosophy - we don't want to restrict people from building these for their own purposes, modifying them, giving away the design, selling the boxes, etc.

Just to be clear, there are 3 different things: * Backblaze Online Backup - $5/month unlimited backup for Mac/Win; automatically does client-side-encryption * Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage - $0.005/GB/mo for object storage (lower cost than Glacier, but we don't yet offer a client, though others are building) * Backblaze Storage Pod - the hardware that underlies both of these, which we also open source for anyone to use

Gleb from Backblaze

We definitely focus on ease-of-backup vs. choices-for-backup. One of the initial things we found we the "pick and choose files & folders to backup" approach is what kept most people from setting up a backup at all because they were confused by the process.

Having said that, we offer the ability to exclude folders and filetypes if you have certain things you want to backup later.

(Not disagreeing with anything you're saying...just fyi.)

Gleb from Backblaze

Very cool. I remember an article I read about a veteran music journalist who applied for a job and was told he had no experience. Turned out every magazine he worked for over 10+ years had shut down and there was not a single online reference of his articles.

Love that you're fighting the good fight (along with the Internet Archive) to keep a history of the Internet.

"Think free as in free speech, not free beer."

It's not under any license, it's just 'free'. We've talked about putting the Storage Pods under a license, and may at some point since we get this question periodically and picking a license that people are familiar with may make it more clear that we really are giving away the design.

We have gotten some other benefits as well. One of our senior support reps decided to join us after reading an IAmA where we talked about the Storage Pods. We just recently hired a senior sys admin and the head of Facebook's Prineville data center, both of whom were a result of reading our storage posts.

Also, when we work with contract manufacturers on building storage pods, talk with data centers about space, etc., it's really convenient to point to public posts to explain what we're talking about rather than having to put NDA's in place.

Overall it results in a lot of awareness and goodwill. It's incredibly gratifying after the team spends many late nights putting these together.

Gleb from Backblaze

> packing up to an order of magnitude more storage into 4U

Where are you buying 40 TB hard drives? I'd love to get some ;-)

We actually don't claim these are 'state of the art', more 'state of the inexpensive'. You can buy faster performance storage servers, more redundant servers, etc. But I believe these are one of, if not the, lowest cost storage servers per GB. (And of course, open source.)

BTW, I'm a fan of Dropbox (use it personally) and, in general, think there is a ton of value in developers, organizations, and companies sharing what they've learned about storage. The better and lower cost it gets, the more interesting things other people can do with it, the bigger the industry, and the more everyone benefits.

(full disclosure - cofounder of Backblaze here)

I'm particularly excited about this version because it is the underpinning of B2 (which required higher performance), but we were still able to keep the costs low.

Would love to have you do it...and hearing about how it goes!

We're at the very beginning of this journey, and heard from a lot of folks that they wanted access to inexpensive cloud storage. I imagine we'll learn a lot more about needs & use cases from people overtime. I can certainly understand the value of WORM storage and it is something we'll definitely consider adding. Appreciate the suggestion!

brianwski below shares a good link...but you make a good point jrnkntl that we should talk more about it on the site. We'll plan to add more content around that on the Why B2 page. Thanks!

I'm thrilled that we can offer this raw cloud storage for just $0.005/GB/month. Would love to hear from the Hacker News community what you do with storage today & what you might do with B2.

Here are my thoughts on our announcement today: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/b2-cloud-storage-provider/

Gleb

Coincidentally, at the last company we did, MailFrontier...someone also registered the misspelling MailFronteir and put up a site selling condoms.

Exactly. Thanks for adding that. They're also used in nearly all large storage systems from Amazon S3 to RAID6.

Not sure either. The magic of luck and algorithms I guess.

Are you planning on using the code in something?

We probably should have submitted this as a "Show HN". Believe this is the first production quality Java library that's open source. You're welcome to do anything you want with it - no license restrictions.

Would love your thoughts and feedback, and to hear of what you do with this erasure coding library.

The tracking on that wasn't easy to align with these data, but from what we've seen the shucked drives seemed to perform similarly. At this point, the percentage of shucked drives in the data set is fairly small.

At Backblaze, we've done a lot of our own analyses on our hard drives to look at which ones are most reliable, whether temperature affects reliability, etc. However, we kept being asked for the raw data so people could run their own analyses.

This data set releases 500 million data points on 41,000 drives. I imagine you guys here at YCombinator/Hacker News are the ones who'd find this data amongst the most useful. Enjoy and let us know what you find!

Fixed. Thanks!

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

That's an interesting idea. We considered trying to get rid of the extra card by mounting 5 drives either on the motherboard or on another card (and hope to experiment with these paths in the future.)

Well either they're making 99% gross margin, or perhaps they need a few Backblaze Storage Pods.

The "green" is certainly a gimmick. But the lower power usage is not. 10 Backblaze Storage Pods full of "green" drives use the same amount of power as 8 pods full of "regular" drives.

Gleb from Backblaze here. Glad you're enjoying the service and the spec design. As for the faceplates, our welding skills aren't great either. However, the company we had cut our steel case for us (www.protocase.com) will cut a custom logo for you into your faceplate as well.

Gleb from Backblaze here. The drives were literally the same inside the external enclosures. We bought a few to start with to check.

We use consumer-grade drives across our entire 40+ petabyte storage farm because we do not need high-performance drives. Instead, we need low-cost, low-power, high-density drives to put into our custom-designed Storage Pods: http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v...

We tested "enterprise drives" and found that from a pure reliability perspective, they actually performed worse in our testing than the consumer drives. With about 5 years and 40+ petabytes of data, we're fairly confident this holds true.

Finally, we assume that all drives will fail and replace about 10 drives every week. The software is written such that the system takes drive failures into account and data is stored redundantly and continuously cross-checked.

One option that Backblaze (and some others) offer is the ability to order an external hard drive with all your data via FedEx. That way, if you need a terabyte of data back, you get it quickly.

You...and 94% of everybody else I'm afraid: http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/12/94-of-computer-users-st...

Agreed that backing up only in transit can be sketchy. Most online backup services (including ours, www.Backblaze.com) encrypt your data on your client. Also, we provide an option to use a private key in which case not only is it encrypted, but only you have the key. Of course, if you forget it the data is completely unrecoverable.