Mass Storage on a Budget

The great thing about computing is that the state of things is constantly improving, and fast. Just take a look at what PCs were being sold five years ago compared to today. Or ten years ago. Today’s processors are exponentially faster than previous generations, as are graphics cards. One area that has always been improving and is much appreciated by a huge number of end consumers, though, is storage.

I keenly remember my AMD K6. I don’t remember what kind of hard drive it came with, but after a while, its density became limiting enough to force me to run out and purchase an 8GB model for around $370. Today, people walk around with 8GB or more in their pocket, in a form-factor the size of a key… for less than $20.

Of course, as desktop users, buying storage today isn’t anything to groan about. We can pick up 1,000GB hard drives for under $100, which means we can store a lot of data on the cheap. Imagine, though… needing many terabytes worth of storage, from dozens, up to hundreds, or thousands. The cost of data then adds up fast, and the prices are difficult to stomach.

Hosting service Backblaze was faced with a predicament. They needed tons of data, but after looking at how much large storage solutions from well-known brands cost, they knew they had to handle things themselves. What’s the cost of a Petabyte from well-known companies like Amazon and EMC? $2.8 million. For those not wanting to haul out a calculator, that’s $2,800 per gigabyte. The least-expensive solution was Dell, at $826,000. Backblaze’s solution? $117,000. Now that’s better.

Rather than hoard the information on how to accomplish this, the company released very detail schematics about how it can be done. Some of the hardware, like the chassis, is custom, but if you’re wanting to save an incredible amount of money, then the extra effort required for that is going to be of no real concern. So, what would YOU do with a petabyte of storage?

At Backblaze, we provide unlimited storage to our customers for only $5 per month, so we had to figure out how to store hundreds of petabytes of customer data in a reliable, scalable way—and keep our costs low. After looking at several overpriced commercial solutions, we decided to build our own custom Backblaze Storage Pods: 67 terabyte 4U servers for $7,867.