![]() The new pod cabinets squeeze one petabyte into three-quarters of a single cabinet for $56,696. ![]() Doubling the density saves the company half of the money spent on both physical space and electricity. One datacenter rack containing 10 pods costs Backblaze about $2,100 per month to operate (the price is divided into thirds for physical space rental, bandwidth and electricity). Backblaze’s new pods store twice as much data in the same space as the old ones. With data center space (and power) at a premium, minimizing storage cost means maximizing density. Having this much conversation about a piece of hardware is unique in the competitive cloud industry. We see our secret sauce as the backup technology on the client and software technology for the cloud.”īudman says he gets feedback from “helpful kindred pod builders,” including Justin Stottlemyer from digital photo storage and sharing company Shutterfly and another unidentified person who setup the Google Group “ OpenStoragePod.” Budman says hundreds of individuals have emailed ideas and feedback to Backblaze over the last year and a half. Most of the storage servers available at the time cost more than $1,000 per terabyte at a time when drives were less than $100 per terabyte. “We built the hardware out of necessity because we could not find anyone selling the hardware we needed. “We see ourselves as a software/service company at heart, trying to build the easiest online backup service available,” Budman says. Imagine Apple inviting people to fully examine and contribute to its products. This openness is unusual for a hardware company. “We wanted to share some of that good karma back.” “We benefitted greatly from many other open-source projects and the efforts that thousands of people put into them,” he explains to VentureBeat. Budman has it right there in his blog, in writing. “You’re welcome to use the design” is a phrase rarely uttered these days in Silicon Valley. It provides some interesting insight to a technology most of us use - unconsciously - but few will ever see or think about. Even if you aren’t interested in building a cloud farm, Budman’s writing is extremely novice-friendly. ![]() This is one of the longest blog posts you will read today. Today’s Backblaze post includes detais on how to make a version 2.0 storage pod, data on the total cost of ownership, the impact of heat on drives and more. For more background, read the original blog post. The cost of the hard drives dominates the price of the overall pod and the system is made entirely of commodity parts. The company shares images of a half-assembled pod. “500,000 people read the blog post and hundreds of companies around the world have since built the storage pods for their own purposes.”īackblaze calls those 135-terabyte, 4U servers “storage pods.” They are self-contained units, composed of metal cases with commodity hardware inside, all designed to put storage online. “When we first open-sourced the storage pod design in 2009, it was the first time it had ever been done,” says Gleb Budman, co-founder and CEO of Backblaze, in an interview with VentureBeat. ![]() Today Backblaze posted a new blog full of information most companies keep hidden about building and running a 15+ petabyte cloud storage farm. ![]()
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