He also leaves out that you could buy 10 of these Backblaze things for the price of one Sun X4540. So with a distributed load, thats 10x the performance, 10x the reliability, etc... I'm not an expert on storage, but I'd be curious to see how that stacks up, never mind the comet-proof redundancy by placing your storage in datacenters across the world.
People often forget that the rack space, the actual physical space, is very costly. Depending on the datacenter, the power might run you just as much too. Last company I worked at was essentially forced out for using too much power per U.
Would you really buy a hackish low-spec solution like this and then place it in a premium rack?
Given the idea, buy 10 and place them at geographically diverse points, you may as well put them in the back room at branch offices or something. Who cares if one goes offline for a while. Hell, put them in countries with good consumer internet connectivity (japan, korea, sweden etc) and just use that.
yeah, cooling systems are designed to handle a certain amount of heat per square foot. Most of the he.net locations around here can only handle 1 15a 120v circut per rack. That's 5 low-power dual-socket servers for a full-sized rack.
When I'm buying data center space I look at cost per watt and ignore the space requirements. I've not yet hit a place that was willing to sell me more power than I could use in a rack. If the space is low/medium density, I fill it with 2 or 3u chassis (I'm currently using http://supermicro.com/products/chassis/3U/833/SC833S2-550.cf... because I got a good deal on a lot of them.) If it looks like they will sell me more power than I can eat with those, I pop in a few of the supermicro 2 in 1u boxes: http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/system/1U/1021/AS-1021TM-T+....
This is part of why you see so many people leaving airspace between 1u servers. (me, I use the 3u servers for 'air gaps' as they run really cool.)
To give people an idea; our main datacenter gives us 2kW per rack, and we pay extra for 4kW. A rack full of these ~700W storage pods would need about double that again, and isn't going to leave you much wiggle room.
OK, so it's less rackspace per TB. But it's still more power, and more cooling. And in terms of filling a rack, power and/or cooling become limiting factors long before volume does.
Haha! Unexpectedly needing a new cage at your DC, or an extra 50kW power, or being told you can't put anything more in your half-full racks because you've exceeded floor loading gets expensive real quick.
Upvoted. I would upvote a million times over if I could. So many developers seem to not realize just how expensive physical plant (and the people to administer it) really is -- "hardware is cheap" fails to account for the facility costs involved in acquiring necessary space, power, cooling to run it -- often ahead of time.
Managing the IT team and a growing data center installation for a medium size business was one of the most enlightening experiences I've had as a developer writing software targeted at "internet-scale".
A few years ago I did some consulting for a datacentre provider that you've almost certainly heard of who were giving serious consideration to buying a utility and operating their own power station, to get their power and cooling at cost. They'd already contemplated and rejected moving their entire operation to northern Alaska/Canada/wherever and just paying to plumb in the bandwidth (customers wanted to be able to get at their kit if they needed to).
At svtix, a tier3 data center in downtown san jose, Not at the top end of the price scale, but not at the bottom, I can get 2 20a 120v circuits (4800w, that's 3360 usable.) and a full locking rack for around $1100 a month. I can buy two or three racks full of power. If I wanted to pull a gig connection to another nearby data center, say, because I couldn't get more at svtix, we are talking something like $500-$1000 a month, depending on how badly I get screwed by my poor negotiation skills.
Just sayin, at those prices, it takes a long time to amortize out a six figure appliance.
At svtix, a tier3 data center in downtown san jose, Not at the top end of the price scale, but not at the bottom, I can get 2 20a 120v circuits and a full locking rack for around $1100 a month. I can buy two or three racks full of power.
As long as that space is available. To guarantee business capacity you'll probably need to buy a large block of rackspace at one time. Of course, capacity availability varies based on the current local business climate, but that's something you have to plan for too.
If I wanted to pull a gig connection to another nearby data center, say, because I couldn't get more at svtix, we are talking something like $500-$1000 a month
Upwards of $1000, but note that GigE is a fairly small link for data center cross-connection and will still usually have a large lead-time. Not only do you need to be able to guarantee sufficient capacity either at svtix or at the other colo, but you need to be prepared to wait to get that capacity allocated for your use.
you have a very good point that you pay much higher prices (or just massively overbuy, which is similar) if you want guaranteed capacity right now, right were you are.
My model is such that it's not that big of a deal to just get an unconnected rack at a new data center and buy transit there. When I was blocked on new power at SVTIX, I slapped a few new servers in at rippleweb.com, which is in Sacramento. If I had a big, expensive san I couldn't replicate, well, then I'd have a different model. (rippleweb has awesome prices on high-power 1U server co-location, but it's not as good as getting a full rack elsewhere.)
But yes, the observation that you pay more if you want your stuff provisioned right now is very correct. At prgmr.com, well, I wait for the deals, so I end up paying a lot less than I would otherwise. (but then, sometimes the 'we are out of space, come back later' message is up for longer than I'd like, as well. It's definitely a compromise.)
The use case for a company like backblaze though allows you to buy bandwidth very cheap because it will be mostly upstream, the direction in which datacenters are normally not seeing much traffic.
