Building a Backblaze Storage Pod
Any visitor to my site can see I’m a user and promoter of Backblaze’s online backup service (and if you’re not backing up your data, you should really give them a look.) Backblaze provides unlimited storage for $5 a month of $50 a year and does all of the heavy lifting in the background without bugging you about the details. You read that right, unlimited storage for $5 a month. Blasphemy? Black magic? Voodoo? Nope. They created their own storage pod that is capable of holding 67 terabytes of data per pod – for $7867 per pod. What they did with that design next is just plain awesome. They gave the design away to the public.
Once again, you read that right – they gave it away for free and encouraged other people to build a storage pod of their own. And who am I to tell them no? There was a lot of talk swirling around the Internet in the days and weeks since the initial release of the design, which got me thinking – is it really possible to build this thing for that cheap? Other people have gotten in on the act, so it seems it can be done with a little blood, sweat and tears.
A Very Brief Background
As anybody that works with computers knows, you’re most likely going to run into a storage shortage at some point in time. Storage is relatively cheap nowadays, but the hardware for the storage isn’t. You can pick up 2TB hard drives for $180 today. That breaks down to $0.08 per GB. It wasn’t all that long ago, you couldn’t get a quarter of that space for that price. Of the roughly $7900 Backblaze claims it takes to build one of their pods, $5400 can be chalked up to the cost of the drives. That leaves $2467 for the case and all the other components to house 67TB worth of storage. That’s 61% of the cost going to storage. Not too bad considering what those components are serving up.
My Mac Pro houses 3.75TB of storage, and at the time of purchase, the whole package ran me nearly $3500. Of that cost, roughly $450 went to the cost of storage. That’s a measly 12% of the total cost going to actual storage. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Mac tax and whatever, but go ahead and put 3.75TB in a tower with 12GB of ram, a dual 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor, a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT and make it cheap. Not going to happen. But to discuss the cost of having a Mac is another topic for another day.
Collecting the Components
While Backblaze provided a list for where they got their parts from, not all of those vendors make it easy to put together one pod. There’s minimum dollar amounts and lot sizes you have to deal with. You’ve also got to deal with parts being out of stock or having insufficient quantities available. All of this spells out tons of fun. But I’m going to make it easier for people. Here’s my parts list, including cost and supplier.
4U Enclosure
- Vendor: Protocase
- Quantity: 1
- Purchase Price: $872
Port Multiplier Backplanes
- Vendor: Protocase
- Quantity: 9
- Purchase price: $499.95
3.3GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
- Vendor: NewEgg.com
- Quantity: 1
- Purchase Price: $269.99
2 Port PCIe SATA II Card
- Vendor: NewEgg.com
- Quantity: 3
- Purchase Price: $80.97 ($26.99/card)
4 Port PCI SATA II Card
- Vendor: Addonics
- Quantity: 1
- Purchase Price: $69.95
Intel DG43NB Motherboard
- Vendor: Tiger Direct
- Quantity: 1
- Purchase Price: $89.99
Case Fans
- Vendor: FrozenCPU
- Quantity: 6
- Purchase Price: $137.70 ($22.95/fan)
4GB DDR2 800 RAM
- Vendor: NewEgg.com
- Quantity: 1
- Purchase Price: $78.49
80GB PATA Boot Drive
- Vendor: NewEgg.com
- Quantity: 1
- Purchase Price: $38.99
On/Off Switch
- Vendor: FrozenCPU
- Quantity: 1
- Purchase Price: $29.95
SATA II Cable
- Vendor: NewEgg.com
- Quantity: 9
- Purchase Price: $22.41 ($2.49/cable)
Nylon Backplane Standoffs
- Vendor: Fairway Fasteners
- Quantity: 100 (smallest lot size available)
- Purchase Price: $55.35
HD Anti-Vibration Sleeves
- Vendor: Protocase
- Quantity: 45
- Purchase Price: $45
Power Supply Vibration Dampener
- Vendor: QuietPC USA
- Quantity: 2
- Purchase Price: $11.70 ($5.85/dampener)
Fan Mount (front)
- Vendor: QuietPC USA
- Quantity: 12 (smallest lot size available)
- Purchase Price: $11.50 ($5.75/package)
Fan Mount (middle)
- Vendor: QuietPC USA
- Quantity: 12
- Purchase Price: $4.95
Nylon Screws
- Vendor: Small Parts
- Quantity: 100 (smallest lot size available)
- Purchase Price: $6.47
Items still to be purchased:
- 1.5TB SATA hard drives
- Power Supplies
- Foam Rubber Pad
Yes, those items still to be purchased are pretty important, but there’s good reason for the wait. I’m waiting for the hard drives to come down in price. I missed my chance earlier this week over at Newegg.com, where they had them for $99.99/drive and I didn’t pull the trigger. As for the power supplies, I still have some questions and am getting answers. I’ll update my list above as soon as I pick some up. I am currently waiting to hear back from the manufacturer of the foam rubber pad.
I know there are larger hard drive available for purchase (namely the 2TB drives), but the cost per GB is cheaper on the 1.5TB drives. There’s only a $.01 difference between the 1.5TB drives and the 2TB drives ($.07 as compared to $.08, respectively), but when you’re talking about 45 hard drives and thousands of GB, the difference really adds up quickly.
But why?
I’ve already had to answer this question from a couple of people. For one, I’m a geek and a half and love this type of stuff. More importantly, I see it as a possible way to provide mass amounts of storage on the cheap for my employer and possibly anybody else interested in having a storage pod of their own down the road.
Tying up loose ends
The last major road block for me will be the operating system to put in the pod. While Backblaze used Debian Linux, I’m not sure if I want to go that route. Windows is totally out of the question, as well as the Mac OS. I’m leaning towards OpenSolaris, but this maybe a game time decision once I get the pod put together. If you’ve got any thoughts on the OS, please let me know.
Thanks for putting up all of the details on this. I saw the backblaze information when it first hit and it looks like a few people are starting to build them on their own. I hope to join the crowd soon and I think it would be good for someone to post a group buy on a forum somewhere. I am just not sure what the best place is. I have a hosted site where I can setup forms but I really don’t have the time to support all of that but I may still do it. As for the OS I think you are on the right track with OpenSolaris. I have been running it with my current file server and I have had no problems (Other than brushing up on solaris). There is even a great distro called EON storage that will boot from a CF or USB drive and is very small. I have done lots of testing and configuration changes (including a couple of SSD drives for read/write caching) and have had great success. It also supports just about every file transfer protocol that one would need. I am currently using it for NFS/CIFS/iSCS (the iSCSI is for VMWare ESX and Time Machine Backups) ZFS / Opensolaris also supports a multitude of enterprise features such as snapshots and other items. I believe de-duplication is also in the works. I am happy to talk to you more about this and have some really good resources for ZFS/opensolaris. I will say I have never had any data loss in the year I have been running it. I even had a drive that was going out but never lost any data. It is rock solid as far as data storage is concerned.
You can also get the port multiplies from Storage4mac @ 48.00 ea. which would save you about some money plus no international shipping.
http://www.storage4mac.com/cfpomupba.html
Ty -
No problem on posting this stuff. I figured somebody out there would get some use out of it. I did see that Storage4Mac was carrying those, but I went with Protocase just because I was getting the case and HD dampeners from them and was really just trying to wrap up my parts list. In doing so, I did pay more and did have to wait a bit extra since the backplanes got hung up in customs somewhere (according to Protocase.)
I did finish building the case and got everything in just to see fit and organization of things. I’ve got to get the OS installed on the boot drive and start testing, which, hopefully, will happen sometime this week. I’ll get some photos together of the pod in it’s built state so people can see close-up how things are supposed to look.
-Steve
Here is another build in progress that has some good information. He is however using Server 2008 as the OS. He has his reasons for doing this and I can understand but I have a separate ESX server for running VM’s via iSCSI. I would rather have the rock solid stability of Solaris and ZFS then layer my services on top of it with a separate server. I do look forward to your build pictures and progress.
Extreme Media Server http://extrememediaservers.blogspot.com/
I’ve e-mailed back and forth with Don about power supplies and a couple other things. I completely understand his reasoning for using Windows on his box, but I have no love for Windows as I’m a Mac guy. Yes, I’ve got to learn a new OS, but I’d rather have to learn a new OS than use one that is bombarded on a daily basis by the garbage of the Internet.
Have you gotten anywhere with the OS installation? I was reading the BackBlaze post and they said they were only accessing the server via https. Is there anyway no other way to access the drives?
I’ve gotten the OS installed on the boot drive, but haven’t gotten things booted up yet. I’ve been busy with other work-related things, and haven’t had a chance to really see how well my build went.
You can access the server’s storage in any way you wish – that’s just how they went about it. It really all depends on how you plan to implement the box. Since they were going to have the boxes Internet facing, they went with HTTPS (among other reasons.) If you are keeping it for local storage and are not planning on accessing the box from the web, then I would go with any protocol you feel comfortable with.
I was wondering if Ty got anywhere with his ZFS pod. We’re big ZFS fans and we’re finally getting our backup appliance company under way after a year of software delays. I’m going to pickup up a couple of those cases from proto for prototype, but when we get into the big numbers we use a Taiwanese manufacturer who builds killer cases on the cheap ,though i like to support fellow Canucks, it’s a big price gap and there’s a few bells and whistles i’d like to add to the cases.
We’ll likely be in full swing by the fall and I can hook people up with a one stop for all the parts and pass on our volume discounts (I hate seeing anyone pay too much, especially me)
Deegan -
I had major issues with OpenSolaris booting the pod. It would either hang or get stuck in a startup loop. I haven’t had a chance to investigate much, but am planning on exploring a different OS.
-Steve
Hey Steve,
Thanks a lot for posting this article. I’m order my parts right now and wondered if you had any more details on the Power Supply issue.
I notice that Plexson is selling 2 Zippy PS with custom wiring:
http://www.plexson.com/store/index.php?l=product_detail&p=251 ($453.90)
http://www.plexson.com/store/index.php?l=product_detail&p=250 ($453.90)
Before committing to anything I was wondering if anyone can send me a link to the PS that worked best for them.
~Q
Quince,
Very cool to have found a vendor that has the exact model Backblaze called for. When I was building my pod, this wasn’t an option for me. I tried to stick to the recipe the best I could, and obviously this helps for anybody trying to do the same. Here’s my other post on building my pod, which discusses the PSU’s:
http://www.speakingdigital.com/2009/11/27/further-along-in-the-backblaze-storage-pod-build/
What are you planning on using for an operating system?
Thanks,
Steve
Steve,
Thanks for sharing the post… I’m heading over right now to see your experience. I’m considering either openSUSE or CentOS for the Operating System. For no other reason than I am familiar with them (more SUSE than CentOS).
The orders were placed today and I’m STRONGLY (but reluctantly) considering using a different brand/size of Hard Drives. The 2TB have come down in cost and my budget (since this is work related) is fairly flexible. I’m open to any suggestion (more weight given to suggestions from experience rather than theory… but all are welcome).
~Q
Quince -
I went with the stock drives since Backblaze tested them and suggested they performed the best. Since that time, there have been several new drives to hit the market and like you said, the 2TB drives have come down considerably. My budget was flexible as well, but since this is a mostly experimental setup, I had to cut costs where possible.
The guys over at Backblaze are fairly responsive to questions, you could always drop them a line and see if they’ve upgraded their pods with 2TB drives and see what they’re using and how they’re performing. I’d take their opinion highly since they’ve got their company on the line when it comes to hardware.
-Steve