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