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Disclaimer - Backblaze employee here, but just speaking for myself:

It was.. sort of cheaper. They didn't actually build the servers, and as described the server wouldn't work (onboard SATA didn't support port multipliers, lack of ECC would probably cause problems in practice, bit hand-wavey on power/space/network/manpower costs, etc). The goal of the article was to get other people to build cheap storage and put it up for rent on their network. They do have some amount of storage space available for very cheap on the network now, but personally I suspect it's people who figured "what the heck, I'll give it a try!" as opposed to people actually building storage servers and making a profit renting them out.

I was honestly pretty disappointed - I'd hoped they'd found a cheap motherboard with ECC and support for port multipliers, but nope.

discuss

Dylan16807|5 years ago

With the client responsible for chunking, redundancy, and error correction, I don't think the lack of ECC really matters for their use case. The rest of the issues are more important.

Edit: The motherboard they picked does support ECC memory, anyway. In general ASRock models do.

ADefenestrator|5 years ago

I haven't dug too deeply, but it's unclear whether anything but the Asrock Rack boards have full validated ECC implementations for Ryzen (vs just using the memory but ignoring ECC), and I think that may depend some on which Ryzen CPU is used (maybe PRO-only). I'd love a source of better info there, though.

You're right though - since the client's doing the work and they have a lot of redundancy/diversity in the storage it's not as big of a deal for them as it would be for us. I'd be a bit wary because the client-only verification does mean that there's no verification-with-ECC step in the entire chain, but I'm not sure that's significantly worse in terms of actual risk.

justinclift|5 years ago

How far off do you reckon Backblaze is from designing your own motherboards + electronics, with just the pieces you need? :)

ADefenestrator|5 years ago

Pretty far. Since we cram so many drives into each server, our total server count is actually relatively low for the amount of storage we have. I'm not sure exactly how many units you need to amortize the design costs across to make it worth it for a custom ODM design, but I suspect it's in the tens of thousands.