Researchers have discovered that a pinch of table salt can get more data onto spinning hard drive platters. A lot more: 6 TB in a single platter!

Considering the latest drives have up to 5 platters, that would be 30 TB in a single hard drive. Put 45 of those drives into a Backblaze Storage Pod and you would store 1.35 petabytes (!) in a single storage pod; more than 10 petabytes in a single rack.

Hello, Big Data. Meet your best friend, Salt.

A single Backblaze Storage Pod weighs nearly 150 lbs and takes two people to rack it. Each time Sean has gone to the data center to rack new pods (which happens every two weeks) he needed to bring another person for assistance. In the interest of giving Sean a hand, we bought him a friend. His name is Guido.

Guido is a $10k server lift and he works like a charm. He can lift the servers onto the very top rack and even has a special extender for the very bottom rack. Sean can now deploy Storage Pods without any help.

Meet Guido:

Sean working with Guido:

And a 3 second video of Guido doing the heavy lifting:

Ok, actually it was Chloe that built the first pod. And Greg that built the second. But those pods were built to store the geospatial information data for GINA – the Geographic Information Network of Alaska.

When searching for pics of Backblaze Storage Pods, I stumbled across Chloe’s Picasa album, and asked her why she needed boatloads of storage. Here’s her story:

The pod you stumbled upon in my Picasa album was one of two that I helped build for the Geographic Information Network of Alaska (GINA) in 2009/2010 when I was still a CS student. (I built the first pod, and finished up the build on the second, which was assembled by my colleague, Greg Wirth).

GINA is a small research group affiliated with the University of Alaska Fairbanks. We operate on grants mostly, so we have to be conservative and wise with our spending. That’s why my boss, Dayne Broderson, chose to use the open hardware that you so generously provide schematics to.

At GINA, we have many years worth of spatial and sattelite imagery, and we keep it all saved away for GIS specialists, cartographers, professors and students at the university to use. We also provide the majority of this data online through Web Mapping Services (WMS) on our website. It’s basically our own Google Earth, so millions of image tiles need to be stored. Given those circumstances, we needed something that would allow the data to be readily available for viewing. That’s where the pods came in.

Our pods are the first (that I’ve heard of, anyway) to be used as High Availability cluster nodes. That means if one pod goes down, the other pod takes over its IP and web services, without the users ever noticing. Since robustness is important to us at GINA, we also altered the design a little to allow for a RAID1 system partition. Otherwise, losing that one system disk could lead to unexpected downtime.

My colleague, Greg, made a mounting bracket that mounted something quite similar to this IcyDock inside our pods. It let us use two 2.5″ hard drives, which we then installed with RAID1 for the OS.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817994087

Here’s the finished product:

The only issue we ran into when building these was the PSU. The Modu 87 was cheaper and more readily available than the other PSU listed on your site, so we tried the Modu first. Here’s a picture of the problem we encountered:
https://xanth.gina.alaska.edu/pod/IMG_8289.JPG

From there, we tested it out with some molex adapters, which helped with the connector angle problem, but didn’t hold up under testing. (I let out the Magic Smoke! >_>)

We finally got our hands on the Plexton PSUs with the custom cabling, and everything from then on was smooth. It cleared up a lot of space inside the cases too, since the cabling was much neater.

It went so well, in fact, and has been running so reliably since, that my boss is considering implementing the V2 design next. I’m kind of jealous that I wont be there to help them build it this time, since I moved away recently to study more high-availability clustering at LINBIT. But that pod build was one of the most fun and interesting projects I’ve done yet!

Thanks for inquiring about our pods,

Best regards,

Stefanie “Chloe” Edgar

Congratulations Chloe on building a high-availability cluster version!
And thank you for sharing the story!

It’s been over a year since Backblaze revealed the designs of our first generation (67 terabyte) storage pod. During that time, we’ve remained focused on our mission to provide an unlimited online backup service for $5 per month. To maintain profitability, we continue to avoid overpriced commercial solutions, and we now build the Backblaze Storage Pod 2.0: a 135-terabyte, 4U server for $7,384. It’s double the storage and twice the performance—at lower cost than the original.

In this post, we’ll share how to make a 2.0 storage pod, and you’re welcome to use the design. We’ll also share some of our secrets from the last three years of deploying more than 16 petabytes worth of Backblaze storage pods. As before, our hope is that others can benefit from this information and help us refine the pods. (Some of the enhancements are contributions from helpful kindred pod builders, so if you do improve your Backblaze pod farm, please balance the Karma and send us your suggestions!)

Quick Review – What makes a Backblaze Storage Pod

A Backblaze Storage Pod is a self-contained unit that puts storage online. It’s made up of a custom metal case with commodity hardware inside. You can find a parts list in Appendix A. You can also link to a power wiring diagram, see an exploded diagram of parts, and check out a half-assembled pod. The two most noteworthy factors are that the cost of the hard drives dominates the price of the overall pod and that the system is made entirely of commodity parts. For more background, read the original blog post. Now let’s talk about the changes.
Continue reading…

Cloud computing success relies on high-speed bandwidth. Whether streaming movies or running applications from the cloud, the ability to get data quickly from the cloud to the computer (or tablet or phone) is a key requirement for rapid adoption.

As such, we decided to take a look at how well Internet bandwidth to the home has kept up with another key ingredient of the cloud: hard drive prices. Below is the comparison and, unfortunately, it seems that while hard drive manufacturers have done a phenomenal job of capacity increases and price reduction (as an example, a petabyte should cost $94 trillion) – bandwidth to the home has not kept up. This means that people are continually able to do more locally than in the cloud.

There have been some interesting announcements in the space recently including Sonic.net testing 1 Gbps fiber for $70 and Comcast demoing 1 Gbps broadband over cable. Will bandwidth change it’s historical trajectory?

Possibly.

A customer yesterday asked, “Do you have any idea how big iCloud is?” I thought it was an interesting question and poked around.

Two months ago it was reported that Apple ordered 12 petabytes of storage rumored to be used for its new North Carolina data center.

Certainly Apple already has significant storage for their existing iTunes and MobileMe data and the North Carolina datacenter has room for much more than 12 petabytes, but is this the storage that Apple expected to need to support the iCloud offering initially? Apple would not confirm, of course, but it does seem plausible now with iCloud announced and Steve Jobs talking about Apple’s massive new datacenter:

Image source: Data Center Knowledge

At Backblaze we hit 10 petabytes of customer cloud storage by the end of 2010 and now we just crossed 15 petabytes!

It’s becoming challenging to take a good photo, but here is what 15 petabytes of Backblaze Storage Pods looks like:

So does Backblaze have more cloud storage than Apple for iCloud? Perhaps.

After shutting down its cloud storage business last month, today Iron Mountain sold the entire Iron Mountain Digital business to Autonomy.

Why did Iron Mountain shut down the cloud storage business and sell off its Iron Mountain Digital business? According to ZDNet, Iron Mountain “is exiting the digital business because it can’t keep up with developing technology.” This is backed up by StorageMojo who says that for it’s cloud storage by “selecting EMC – a premium-priced provider – suggests that IM got off on the wrong foot and never recovered.”

Iron Mountain Digital offered online backup to its customers and charged approximately $60 per computer per month for 30 GB! That is 12 times more than Backblaze charges for its online backup for unlimited storage. Backblaze was able to offer this service profitably at the $5 per month price point by focusing from day one on developing our own cloud storage system which at 10 petabytes five months ago already stored 2x more data for our customers than Iron Mountain.

Are you using Iron Mountain for your online backup needs? Worried about where your service is headed? Interested in a more cost-efficient offering?

We’re ready to help with your business online backup needs.

Twitter turned 5 years old yesterday. The service now has 200 million users (including @backblaze) who post over 1 billion tweets per day.

One interesting tidbit they recently mentioned was that all of those billions and billions of tweets compiled over the course of half a decade took a mere 20 terabytes of storage space!

In other words, you could archive all of the last 5 years of Twitter in just 1/3rd of an original Backblaze Storage Pod.

Happy Birthday Twitter! We wish you an amazing next five years!