A petabyte of storage with home-built pods
Summary
Backblaze publishes the design of its Storage Pod, which bundles many standard hard drives in an inexpensive Linux storage server. The first pod offered 67 terabytes of raw capacity. The case held 45 SATA hard drives.
Ideas
- Standard hard drives lower capital costs compared with proprietary storage systems.
- A purpose-built case maximises drive density and airflow.
- Linux provides familiar tools for devices, file systems and monitoring.
- Several power supplies spread the electrical load across many drives.
- Software provides redundancy across several independent storage nodes.
- Open bills of materials make costs and replication verifiable.
Insights
- Cheap individual parts only become reliable through software-based redundancy.
- Hardware design has to solve thermal, electrical and mechanical limits together.
- Open infrastructure designs speed up improvements outside the original team.
- Cost per terabyte says little without operating and recovery costs.
Facts
- Backblaze published case drawings and a bill of materials.
- The server used Linux and off-the-shelf components.
Recommendations
- Plan for failures of drives, power supplies and whole nodes separately.
- Monitor the temperatures and SMART values of every drive.
- Test rebuild times when storage utilisation is already high.
References
Links to the original source and the Web Archive open in a new tab.