The first run is due to be fabricated on the 28th, we will have 4 or 5 spare if anyone wants some.
Tom
July 21, 2010
June 8, 2010
Updated Backblaze Storage Pod Design Sent To Be Fabbed In The UK
We have collected the moneys and the 2D manufacturing diagram are with the factory now. It will be in “Fine texture black” and I will be printing some UKBlazers labels to stick on mine to jazz it up a bit.
We made a few additions to the design to accommodate lowering the hard drive cage to run without the port multipliers (more on that later, hoping for Thumper-like performance!) allow for the manufacture to be punch only rather than requiring laser cutting and holes for 2×2.5″ disks for the OS. You can get the files here and a viewer for them at this site . I hope these files are of some use if someone else is going to do this.
We will have a few spare so if anyone wants to get some, please email me at tom@tthuk.com
May 19, 2010
Well the time has come, scheduling the first run
Sorry for the delay everyone, things have been really hectic with a friends wedding in the US and a job in Libya for a big telco.
I have just sent invoices to the people who have confirmed their orders and will now be scheduling the first run. If you want to join in please get in touch in the next 14 days and I will include you. The price for all the “bits” mentioned here (ie all bar CPU/RAM/Mobo and disks) is £810 so the price for case and bits is £1210.
Tom
April 6, 2010
UK Sources For The Other BackBlaze Storage Pod Parts
Hi all,
Sorry for the delay in updating the site, I have been in Dubai deploying VMware View 4 for a client there.
We are going to schedule a run of 10 of the Storage Pods in Matt Black as a proof of concept so they will be at the £400+P&P previously announced. If you want to get involved please get in touch. The timing is dependent on the lead time for the Port Multipliers from Chun Fan, I will keep you posted.
Port Multipliers
Chun Fan have bulk pricing on the Port Multipliers as follows:
200pcs US40
150pcs US41
100pcs US42
50pcs US43
40pcs US43.5
30pcs US44
20pcs US44.5
10pcs US45
5pcs US45.5
1pc US46
So if people want us to organise those as well, its 9*$43+P&P+Tax (total TBC) on top of the case price.
We have looked around for UK suppliers for the other parts to build the Pods and if people want us to handle the purchase of all the components, please let us know and we can bulk order.
Power Switch
Bulgin Orange Dot Lighted Vandal Proof Switch
PSU / PSU Molex Cable
Enermax Modu82+ 525W
Modular Molex x3
I am tempted to go for a 1250 Watt one to save space and have less to go wrong (obviously peak draw might be a problem), also I cant find a mobo stub to allow a second PSU to power on without a mobo.
2 Port PCIe SATA II Card
Unbranded from Span – £14.10
4 Port PCI SATA II Card
Unbranded from Span – £49.70
I think depending on the chipset, this 4-port PCI-e card could be a good alternative.
SATA II Cable
100cm Akasa AK-CB056 Right angle connector SATA II cable inc Latch connector – Red/Black, scan £1.87
Incidentals
I will be sourcing a bulk load of these from the US and can pass them along to people :
Nylon Screws
HD Anti-Vibration Sleeves
Nylon Backplane Standoffs
Vibration / Noise
120mm x 38mm Fan (x6)
Scythe Ultra Kaze 2000RPM 120 x 38mm Cooling Fan
(Backblaze use Mechatronics G1238M12B1-FSR 120 x 38 mm 2,800 RPM 12V Fan, but I could not find one, pretty sure this will shift as much air)
Power Supply Vibration Dampener
Vantec VDK-PSU Power Supply Vibration Dampener (2) – Tekheads, £1.76
Fan Mount (front)
Acousti Ultra Soft Anti-Vibration Fan Mount AFM02
Fan Mount (middle)
Acousti Ultra Soft Anti-Vibration Fan Mount AFM03
Foam Rubber Pad
16″ x 17″ x 1/8″ Foam Rubber Pad, ~£1.50 from twfoam
Mobo/CPU/RAM
To your own taste really, Id like to get one with 5xPCI-e to avoid the 4x PCI card.
Hard Disks
Sticking with the Backblaze recommendation and getting the low power Seagate drives is probably a good idea
Seagate ST32000542AS 2TB Hard Drive SATAII 5900rpm 32MB Cache – OEM (Ebuyer) £109.95 inc VAT **UPDATE 12 APRIL**
Hope this saves people some time searching the net.
Tom
March 23, 2010
Ready to buy a Backblaze Storage Pod in the UK / EU ?
We have had contact from a few people so far and will be scheduling the first run in April.
The colour of the first run will be “Black fine texture powdercoated” as that was the default and cheapest. Custom runs can be a different colour if you are prepared to pay more.
Please get in touch if you want to get in on this initial run.
- Tom
February 28, 2010
Prices For Cases
We have just got those prices for the cases, if you want to have a run of your own we can schedule separately for the prices below.
I assumed that people would want to club together and try to access the lower prices for a combined bulk order, I would like to do the first in 1 month (deadline to join is April 1st)
10 = £400
20 = £350
50 = £300
100 = £275
(These may shift down slightly but I am assured they will not go up and they do not include postage. They are all less than the $700 BackBlaze listed for Protocase)
Please send mail to tom@tthuk.com with
- Who you are
- How many cases you want
- At what price you would buy in at (ie if you want some but only if we reach a certain price point)
I have a VAT registered, UK limited company I will be invoicing from for these and can arrange shipping anywhere in the EU.
February 11, 2010
Backblaze Manufacture
Having looked at the backblaze pod they have done a very god job of making the unit affordable and functional. It is hard to find anywhere to remove cost.
I have made only 1 change so far which is more for manufacture than anything else. The company we will be using for manufacture primarily use punching machines rather than laser cutters. To allow for this i have removed the Backblaze Logo and removed the venting pattern from the fan mounts. For ease these will be replaced with after market wire grills.
Removing the laser detail and adapting the design for punching does have other advantages. The punching machines can work a lot faster than the Laser cutters. This means that it costs less to produce each item once the initial set up has been completed.
On orders of about 10 units plus we should see a cost saving over the price from Protocase listed on the backblaze blog.
I will upload solid models soon to show the changes made to the fan grills (even though this is only a very minor change)
I have completed the manufacturing 2D manufacturuing drawings and we should have final prices for the units within the next 2 weeks.
January 21, 2010
UK source for case, port multiplers ordered
Great news, I have made contact with CFI about the port multipliers and have ordered 10 to test support within FreeBSD and OpenSolaris (for all that ZFS goodness)
Even more exciting: John has made a small amend to the Backblaze design to make the fabrication cheaper and found a UK supplier to complete the work. We have contacted backblaze and they are curious and excited about the change (it avoids needing to laser cut parts of the design, John will explain later). Initial costings suggest we can beat the price listed on the backblaze blog for orders of 10+. Our hope is that we can get a consortium of interested people together and make a bulk order. I do not want to get anyones hopes up and list them till I have solid prices.
I have begun a wiki to get down ideas for the software stack to try and achieve robust file and block level access to storage in a stack of pods, the first article is about identifying all the drives in a pod in linux.
I am off to CloudCamp Londontonight, I hope to get some folk there interested.
- Tom
Building A Backblaze Storage Pod
A while ago I saw the Backblaze storage pod and was impressed.
Like many others I thought:
- I want one
- Wouldn’t it work great with ZFS
- The hardware sucks
Building one
I used to make and sell storage servers using Linux a while ago with media streaming software and easy setup (before all the ready-rolled ones came out) so the software side is not a major challenge. Backblaze have released a template for the cases and a list of other components and coincidentally a good friend is a Mechanical Design Engineer and can work on it for me. The cost for the cases drops precipitously if you buy in bulk and he is looking at making it able to be stored flat and easily assembled by folding edges together so I will take the plunge and buy a load, if anyone wants to get hold of some, please get in touch.
ZFS
As soon as you see so many disks in a case like that, it’s hard not to think of Sun’s Thumper and ZFS.
I’ve blogged about ZFS before and given talks on it. With so many disks to fail (either noisily or silently) data loss is inevitable (and worse – you may not even be alerted), ZFS would solve this (or at least ensure you know about it). BackBlaze use custom application logic to work around this, using TomCat and HTTPS.
It’s Not Highly Available
A chap at Sun has a critique here that is totally spot on and he makes a few great points about subtle changes to Sun’s design to accommodate vibration, noise and electromagnetic radiation. In so many ways the hardware is inadequate and does not have the uptime characteristics of a device in Suns range. That said though an individual device from Sun is not as HA as, say, an EMC SAN (with mirrored write cache, dual SPs etc) as it too relies mostly on commodity hardware. For FiveNines availability you need to decide what you are doing to protect against device failure anyway, the BackBlaze devices just fail faster – that’s your trade-off.
It wont be fast
That is largely a feature of the disks and the controllers; you could get a better motherboard, disks and faster controllers, perhaps eschew the port multipliers too, if performance is a problem. A very cool new feature of ZFS (L2ARC / Hybrid Storage Pools) allows for using SSD as a second level cache, that would help. In linux dm-cache (or here) could probably achieve something similar.
How can you make it HA?
This is really another blog (and a few weeks work hacking out the ideas), but I can think of several ways of doing what BackBlaze do in their software stack to export files (via NFS, SMB or other protocol) or block devices (ATAoE, iSCSI, NBD etc) in a robust manner.
I have ordered some of the port multipliers, got my friend working on the case and will buy the sundry bits over the next few days.
Twitter: ukblazers
- first run due to be fabricated on the 28th, some Pods spare, get in touch if interested. http://ukblazers.com/2010/07/21/first-run/
- is due to receive the first run on the 28th! Took longer than expected but its happening!
- -Updated @backblaze Storage Pod Design Sent To Be Fabbed In The UK , few minor tweeks to the design,models available at http://bit.ly/dsuZex
Twitter: thattommyhall
- 's feet took him to an all you can eat sushi bar and grill. Hello Sumo, where have you been all my life