Backblaze storage pod7/3/2023 So, each month we’d need 60 CPUs, 720 SATA cables, 120 power supplies, and so on. Still, each month we currently build 60 or so new Storage Pods. That’s a trivial number of parts and vendors for a hardware company, but stating the obvious, Backblaze is a software company. Each Storage Pod has 25 different parts from 15 different manufacturers/vendors, plus the red chassis, and, of course, the HDDs. You just have to look at the bill of materials for Storage Pod 6.0 to know that we use commercially available parts wherever possible. Follow along as we step through our thought process and let you know what we’re thinking – after all, it’s your data we are storing, and you have every right to know how we plan to do it. A lot has changed.Īs we plan for the next 10 years of providing customers with easy to use cloud storage at a fair price, we need to consider all of these points and more. Since that time, the supply chain for the commodity parts we use continues to reinvent itself, the practice of just-in-time inventory is being questioned, the marketplace for high-density storage servers continues to mature, and the continuing cost effectiveness of scaling the manufacturing and assembly of Storage Pods has proved elusive. In that post, we contemplated the next generation Backblaze Storage Pod and outlined some of the criteria we’d be considering as we moved forward with Storage Pod 7.0 or perhaps a third-party vendor. In September of 2019, we celebrated the 10-year anniversary of open-sourcing the design of our beloved Storage Pods. In addition to the standard pod designs, we have built a large number of customized pods (in fact, we end up customizing almost 50 per cent of pods to some degree).By Andy Klein, principal storage cloud evangelist, Backblaze, Inc. Over the years, we have listened to feedback from hundreds of very bright people involved in a wide variety of applications. Because we are part of Protocase, a mass customizer and the fastest low-volume metal manufacturer on earth, evolving the design was an inevitable step for us and continues to be an ongoing endeavour. And we really can't help thinking about variations to the design, and how it might improve the pod for various applications. But we experienced a number of challenges when we sold these to the larger storage community.Īt 45 Drives, it is in our nature to get to know our customers and what they are doing (or want to do) with their pod. But all things considered, limited throughput speed was a reasonable sacrifice for Backblaze, and backplanes were what drove the success of Pods 1.0 to 3.0.īackblaze has operated their business successfully for years now, mostly with backplane machines. Also, data for 5 drives shares 1 SATA cable (3Gbit in the original design), limiting performance to 60 MBytes per second per drive (whereas mechanical drives can transfer approximately 150 MBytes per second). Physical dimensions of 5 port boards follow a defacto standard. The SATA adaptors must be chipset compatible with the backplane port multipliers, and drivers are required. There are a few restrictions and caveats, of course. Combined with Backblaze's vertical mounting, this was a brilliant design. Therefore, 45 drives require only 9 cables and SATA ports. This allows up to 5 hard drives to be plugged into the board, and multiplexed and sent through 1 cable to a shared SATA port. These are circuit boards that have multiple SATA hard drive connectors (5, in this case), and one SATA cable connector. The original Backblaze Storage Pods were designed around port multiplier backplanes.
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