Back in Backplanes: Backblaze unveils 180TB Storage Pod 4.5
Back in Backplanes: Backblaze unveils 180TB Storage Pod 4.5
Massive backup company Backblaze has published an updated spec for its Storage Pod container system, and the new 4.5 system contains multiple changes compared to the previous version. We’ve previously covered Backblaze’s hard drive reliability reports, including the company’s decision to release its entire set of data for anyone to examine. But it doesn’t just give information on reliability — it provides details on how it builds massive containers for 180TB hard drive configurations.
The major change with Storage Pod 4.5 is the return to backplanes. With Storage Pod 4.0, Backblaze had explicitly junked the backplane approach, claiming that previous designs that used high-density port multipliers to hit capacity targets had suffered from poor reliability and high prices. When a backplane would fail, it would affect every drive on the plane, not just one — and apparently the planes failed rather frequently. Storage Pod 4.0 connected 45 hard drives directly to three Highpoint Rocket 750 cards. Now, with Storage Pod 4.5, the company is moving back to backplanes, this time powered by the Marvell 9715 chipset.
Backblaze doesn’t come right out and say it, but the implication is that this direct wire method proved to be a great deal of trouble. The company refers to growing pains and says it worked for several months to get the design right, but was stuck trying to deploy SP 4.0 systems despite not having worked all the kinks out of the design. The implication is that it was less expensive to move back to the old way of doing things, rather than continue trying to solve the routing challenges of 45 SATA drives per chassis.
Other updates are in the new design, like a very small CPU uptick, to a Core i3-2120 from the Core i3-2100. The Core i3-3240 has also been evaluated and found to work perfectly. Virtually any Intel Core-class processor should work for a system like this, though Backblaze notes it’s only tested these three chips.
So what’s it cost to roll your own 180TB array?
Here’s the really surprising part: Building a 180TB-capable storage array is cheap, not counting the storage.
Ok, it’s not “Pizza and beer” cheap — but Backblaze’s official retail cost for everything, soup-to-nuts, including power supplies, screws, foam tape, and a single 80GB boot drive is just $2,222.74. That doesn’t count assembly time or configuration once the system is booted, but $2,200 is a remarkably low price for an enclosure that can house this much sheer storage volume.
Anybody out there ever considered building one of these? Drop by and let us know.
malikmuddser