Ah yes, the reliable BackBlaze folks. That they've out-Googled Google in a niche using mostly commodity infrastructure and kept their business alive for so long is a testament to their ingenuity (I wonder how their operating costs compare with AWS Glacier which has a theoretical advantage of unpowered disks.). And the releasing of this proprietary operational business data is a testament to their coolness factor.
It's a timely article as I'm looking at HC530's (WUH721414ALE6L4 / WUH721414ALN6L4 (wiredzone carries it)) for a home FreeNAS box:
- any relatively-modern enterprise 4U 3.5" storage box with Xeon 4 cores or so
- quieter, high-volume fan mod
- RAM: 64-128 GiB, beyond that isn't useful unless deduping
- NIC: X710-T4L 4x 10GbE copper NIC
- ZIL: mirrored pair of high-endurance, write-intensive, reliable SSD like Optane 900p/905p 280-480GB
- L2ARC: striped pair of read-intensive/larger SSDs like the Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 1 TB
This will fit nicely as my home NAS for a water-cooled dual EPYC virtualized server/workstation build underway. I managed to get a single water block with (3) G1/4 connections that will cool both CPUs and the VRM chokes/converters.
If anyone has better suggestions, please chime in.
Why does someone need something like this? I ran a home symbology NAS at one point but it wasn’t worth the trouble. Let others run and maintain those hot, loud, power hungry disks.
Speed. Streaming files (movies, tv shows, youtube channels, linux ISO's, large file collections) is a lot faster; I can reliably hit 100MB/s on my home connection, my DSL caps out at 20MB/s if I do nothing else.
I’m a Backblaze customer of many years & respect their team a lot. But seriously, “out-Googling Google” because they have cheaper storage is a meme that needs to die.
GCP and AWS both store full copies of your data in multiple locations by default (Availability Zones in AWS-speak). So it’s not an apples to apples comparison. The reduced redundancy is priced in, for people who can tolerate it.
Woah, chillax the dramatic rhetoric, your majesty. ;-P
The original scrappy Google was founded on commodity hardware held together by LEGO. The point was to not do as enterprise with redundant everything, which was wasteful for web-serving use-cases that were solved with better high-availability in software. These days, if you're a giant company like FAANG, you can easily afford to go to Quanta and say: give me 10k racks worth of compute nodes to this specification. If you're starting out and broke, you gotta use what's on the shelf, cobble together a custom solution optimized for the purpose and/or kit out a test lab with a mis-mash of used servers from eBay.
It's a timely article as I'm looking at HC530's (WUH721414ALE6L4 / WUH721414ALN6L4 (wiredzone carries it)) for a home FreeNAS box:
- any relatively-modern enterprise 4U 3.5" storage box with Xeon 4 cores or so
- quieter, high-volume fan mod
- RAM: 64-128 GiB, beyond that isn't useful unless deduping
- NIC: X710-T4L 4x 10GbE copper NIC
- ZIL: mirrored pair of high-endurance, write-intensive, reliable SSD like Optane 900p/905p 280-480GB
- L2ARC: striped pair of read-intensive/larger SSDs like the Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 1 TB
This will fit nicely as my home NAS for a water-cooled dual EPYC virtualized server/workstation build underway. I managed to get a single water block with (3) G1/4 connections that will cool both CPUs and the VRM chokes/converters.
If anyone has better suggestions, please chime in.