This is my response to a request on a different mailing list. Thought a few might like to read some of the information in case they are in the need for a lot of 'personal storage'.
--- DIY big data server... http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/ http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/ -- older version of same article Actually a pretty good article. Supposedly 135T for under $8K in a single 4U case. If you buy a single case from their case maker they charge a bit more than backblaze allows in their budget. And backblaze even does 'black friday' sales. they had customers buy a specific external disk drive that has the 3T drives they like, and ship them in. they paid a bounty for the drives. I guess still must be less than they can buy it for from the manufacturer. The case and software design is all open source, and runs Linux. They don't give away their 'magic sauce' for clients, but if you want it for a NAS server,it is a proven design and you can run whatever software you want on it. I guess you could even use their software on one of these units and backup one to their service for $5/mo since there is no limit to the data they allow you to use. Their clients are Win and Mac only I think. That is why I use Crashplan that also has a Linux client on my machines. an interview talking about linux client development with a backblaze bigwig: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2786390 a blog about backblaze philosophy for client development: http://blog.backblaze.com/2008/12/15/10-rules-for-how-to-write-cross-platform-code/ Their software seems to be Debian with Tomcat running on ext4 file systems in LVM and uses RAID6. Their 'special sauce' seems to be in their application logic running in Tomcat over HTTPS and in their client software. But this is all my extrapolation. They did note that this is a good environment for their write-mostly application use. If you are serving video's or lots of read mostly needs, some other decisions might be better. For a home/small business system for backup, datadump, whatever, it doesn't sound like a bad idea. Still be ready to buy another drive every few months as insurance WHEN drives fail. ... And if you have the right client, back it all up to a 'cheap backup service' :) if you can afford the bandwidth! :) ><> ... Jack Life is complex: it has a real part and an imaginary part. -- Martin Terma -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en
