BackBlaze Shares Its Secrets

Filed in archive Online on September 5, 2009

Online backup company Backblaze recently released the design for the 67-terabyte BackBlaze Storage Pods the company uses to support its cloud storage system. According to the company, each pod costs $7,867 to build.

"Large scale, reliable storage is a critical building block for many companies," says BackBlaze CEO Gleb Budman. "By providing this design to the community, we hope to drive the continued evolution of inexpensive, reliable storage."

"Each of the Backblaze Storage Pods is a self-contained unit," writes The Inquirer's Nick Farrell. "It's a 4U custom metal rackmount case with an Intel motherboard and four SATA cards in it. Nine SATA cables run from the cards to nine port-multiplier backplanes that each have five hard drives plugged directly into them. This provides 45 hard drives in total. Three groups of 15 hard drives are each combined into a single RAID6 volume with two parity drives."

"This is mostly just a publicity stunt by Backblaze," notes ZDnet's Jason Hiner. "However, I have to admit that it's a really good one. It can offer some real value to IT departments and create a positive brand impression of Backblaze with IT pros, who tend to serve as the personal tech support department for all of their friends, family, and neighbors, and that often includes recommending services such as backup."

"Clever marketing ploy or not, it's definitely turned a lot of heads and seems to be a decent recipe to follow if you're considering building your own arrays," writes GenomeWeb's Matthew Dublin.

More here from The Guardian ... more here from Mashable ... more here from TUAW ... and the press release is here.