This setup need lots of inexpensive but reliable storage space. Check out this “open source” engineering:
https://www.backblaze.com/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage.html
Touted by ZDNet saying, “Raw disk cost is only 5-10% of an enterprise RAID system’s cost. The rest goes for corporate jets, sales commissions, tradeshows, sheetmetal, 2 Intel x86 mobos, obscene profits and some pale and blinking engineers in a windowless lab who make it work.” http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=603
At Backblaze, we provide unlimited storage to our customers for only $5 per month, so we had to figure out how to store hundreds of petabytes of customer data in a reliable, scalable way—and keep our costs low. After looking at several overpriced commercial solutions, we decided to build our own custom Backblaze Storage Pods: 67 terabyte 4U servers for $7,867.
In this post, we’ll share how to make one of these storage pods, and you’re welcome to use this design. Our hope is that by sharing, others can benefit and, ultimately, refine this concept and send improvements back to us. Evolving and lowering costs is critical to our continuing success at Backblaze.
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Backblaze Needs Plenty of Reliable, Cheap Storage
To say that Backblaze needs lots of storage is an understatement. We’re a backup service, so our datacenter contains a complete copy of all of our customers’ data, plus multiple versions of files that change. In rough terms, every time one of our customers buys a hard drive, Backblaze needs another hard drive. A long time ago we stopped measuring storage in our datacenter in gigabytes or terabytes and started measuring in petabytes.
To offer our service at a reasonable price, we need affordable storage at a multi-petabyte scale.
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