That "COST OF A PETABYTE" image really puts things in perspective in
terms of how much you pay for 'vendor value add'..

EMC = 2.8 MILLION. ok EMC representatives on the list, please
explain what we are paying an extra 3 MILLION for.... is it the polo
logo? 8)

and what the heck is Amazon doing on there? don't they sell books
online? I must be way behind the times...

-g

http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/

EMC = Es Muy Costoso

I suspect they charge that much because their target customers (large enterprise) have IT departments who are willing to drink the kool aid. Those customers keep buying costly, less-flexible systems, and pay a premium for it. Heck, less than 10 years ago even Avid had standardized their FibreChannel products on EMC Clariion, and passed those costs onto their customers. Again, people bought into it. Did it work? Yes. Were there less-expensive options equally capable? Yes. Did Avid support them? No.

Companies like NetApp, Isilon, and BlueArc are costlier than off-the-shelf hardware because of the engineering and support required by customers. They also have their own IP (intellectual property) that they've invested heavily into. I can't say that EMC has the same level of IP as some of the others, but I don't know that they don't. I just know that on a pure per-TB basis, they are off the chart.

By "rolling their own", Backblaze is taking that extra support and engineering burden on themselves. Surely that $7867 number doesn't include the countless manhours incurred with all of that procurement, engineering, and testing, nor whatever time was spent optimizing the open source code to meet their requirements. It also can't include the manhours required to maintain and replace faulty hardware going forward. Is there any guarantee those parts will be available 2 or 3 years from now? What will they do when they're not?

Amazon has their own cloud storage offering that they started rolling out a couple of years ago. http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/ Although I doubt Amazon is building their own storage, they are offering the same type of service as Backblaze.

---Ken

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 8:39 AM, Greg Whynott Greg.Whynott@oicr.on.cawrote:

That "COST OF A PETABYTE" image really puts things in perspective in terms of how much you pay for 'vendor value add'..

EMC = 2.8 MILLION. ok EMC representatives on the list, please explain what we are paying an extra 3 MILLION for.... is it the polo logo? 8)

and what the heck is Amazon doing on there? don't they sell books online? I must be way behind the times...

-g

http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/

_ StudioSysAdmins-Discuss mailing list StudioSysAdmins-Discuss@studiosysadmins.com http://mailman.studiosysadmins.com/mailman/listinfo/studiosysadmins-discuss

Good points Ken.

for 3 million, you could hire a full time guy(or a team for that matter!) and keep him employed for 10+ years to develop/maintain your homemade solution. Part availability i think is a non issue. Commodity parts tend to linger much longer than proprietary parts from a niche vendor. besides, if you saved 1/2 a mill or more on rolling your own (all in), in 3-5 years you'll be past the time where you should be considering a refresh, even with a vendor solution. Everything that was new 3 years ago can still be ordered today I'd suspect. I just had to replace a 36 gig SCSI 320 drive in my personal server, that drive was considered 'current' over 6 or 7 years ago, yet I found one, brand new.

and just to touch on another post unrelated... someone was speaking about LUSTER being a NAS solution. You could certainly set up a host to be a NAS device which was attached or had access to the LUSTER solution. What interested us with LUSTER here was the HPC cluster's nodes would/could have a concept of the LUSTER FS being a local block device. The kernel drivers present the LUSTER FS as a block device to the host. there were a few other things too, such as less code for the data to pass threw before it hits the wire, more efficient protocols on the wire (dedicated storage network segment).. In some of the worlds largest installations of HPC, LUSTER is there. That should be all that is required to be said if anyone has any doubts as to weather or not it is a viable solution. If the skill set is the issue, you can pay for support from a few places, but I'd always recommend SUN. Put a 10Gbit card in each host and you would have more potential than 4/8Gbit FC media, for a lot less money.. 8) if you needed/wanted that amount of bandwidth...

-g

On Sep 2, 2009, at 1:02 PM, Ken Spickler wrote:

EMC = Es Muy Costoso

I suspect they charge that much because their target customers (large enterprise) have IT departments who are willing to drink the kool aid. Those customers keep buying costly, less-flexible systems, and pay a premium for it. Heck, less than 10 years ago even Avid had standardized their FibreChannel products on EMC Clariion, and passed those costs onto their customers. Again, people bought into it. Did it work? Yes. Were there less-expensive options equally capable? Yes. Did Avid support them? No.

Companies like NetApp, Isilon, and BlueArc are costlier than off-the-shelf hardware because of the engineering and support required by customers. They also have their own IP (intellectual property) that they've invested heavily into. I can't say that EMC has the same level of IP as some of the others, but I don't know that they don't. I just know that on a pure per-TB basis, they are off the chart.

By "rolling their own", Backblaze is taking that extra support and engineering burden on themselves. Surely that $7867 number doesn't include the countless manhours incurred with all of that procurement, engineering, and testing, nor whatever time was spent optimizing the open source code to meet their requirements. It also can't include the manhours required to maintain and replace faulty hardware going forward. Is there any guarantee those parts will be available 2 or 3 years from now? What will they do when they're not?

Amazon has their own cloud storage offering that they started rolling out a couple of years ago. http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/ Although I doubt Amazon is building their own storage, they are offering the same type of service as Backblaze.

---Ken

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 8:39 AM, Greg Whynott <Greg.Whynott@oicr.on.caGreg.Whynott@oicr.on.ca> wrote: That "COST OF A PETABYTE" image really puts things in perspective in terms of how much you pay for 'vendor value add'..

EMC = 2.8 MILLION. ok EMC representatives on the list, please explain what we are paying an extra 3 MILLION for.... is it the polo logo? 8)

and what the heck is Amazon doing on there? don't they sell books online? I must be way behind the times...

-g

http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/