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but at the end of the day, being able to understand the premium you pay for a vendor's product or service critical to making a good decision. There are certainly a lot of great companies out there making exciting products. But mostly, I like having their numbers around when I am talking to storage vendors. I alway enjoy seeing the Backblaze posts about new pods every few years, or seeing their reports about drive model reliability . Don't forget that the time you spend putting it all together is worth quite a bit as well, and you may be better paying a third party to do it for you for around $10,500. The single unit cost of the current design, meaning you want to buy the parts yourself to build just one is $8,493.11. While building your own arrays isn't an exercise for every enterprise, it is worth noting that using this design, their cost is down to $0.044 per GB, and only $7,974 for each Pod when buying 300+ per year. They've reported many times that they group 20 Pods into what they call a "Vault" which provides redundancy and availability for users' data. The community also reportedly includes companies like Netflix that have used the design as a starting point to build their own cache appliances which they give to ISPs to lower bandwidth costs of distributing popular content pu caching it closer to end users.īackblaze configures the current Pod with 4TB drives, for a total of 180TB of storage. Over the years, a small community of followers have spent many hours debating refinements to the designs and posted photos and descriptions of their own "builds". The list comes with prices, so you can have an idea what you should be expecting to pay. All the stuff that you typically can't make just one of in a reasonably affordable way. They recently posted on their blog announcing the latest revision of the design, release 5.0. īeyond just a few diagrams, each release of the storage "pod" as it's called, comes with a parts list of commodity parts and a short list of vendors who will sell you parts that are more custom to the design like the metal chassis, backplane guides, rails, etc. One of the keys to their success has been to design their own drive arrays from off the shelf parts rather than to provision the arrays from the who's who of raid array vendors (EMC, NetApp, HP, Dell, etc.) Since Backblaze doesn't sell hardware, and because they want to be good open source citizens, they decided to open source the design of the array they designed. Since 2009 Backblaze has been offering an online backup service to their customers at a very competitive price.
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