Michael Carter › Likes

Put me down for two. - Jason Shellen

45 drives per unit and many units means they must be constantly replacing failed hard drives - just due to the sheer quantity of them in use - Jacob Old

It wasn't entirely clear to me from the blog post what you have to do to replace a drive. Looks like at minimum you have to remove the unit from the rack, and I don't see any drawer guides or similar to assist with that. And do they have to take the unit offline to replace a single drive? - Jason Wehmhoener

Geez. Back in 1998, Microsoft was bragging about their 1 TB cloud... :-) Millions of $ then I think. - Mitchell Tsai

One happy Backblaze customer checking in. - Russellreno

sounds neat - now what to do with 67 TB of storage... - Matt Ellsworth

Seriously Matt! Lots and Lots and Lots of video? HD video! - Rick Cogley

So, they store their data "securely" in Palo Alto? That makes me scared. - Jonas S Karlsson

Quoted from blog- "Backblaze Storage Pods are building blocks upon which a larger system can be organized that doesn’t allow for a single point of failure." They have indicated an amazing amount of cost savings. - Wins Fern

$117k for a petabyte of storage. Wow. - Nicholas James

Petabyte schmetabyte. - Rick Cogley

Mitchell: I don't think 1TB was "millions of dollars" in 1998. - Steve de Mena

Nice idea. Pity that it only supports a HTTPS interface, not surprising at that cost though (the software that runs the filesystems on the NetApp and other devices isn't exactly cheap to write). Anyone see if they quoted transfer speeds? I'm wondering what impact the four SATA cards each with SATA multipliers on them has when it comes to access speeds. - Russ

Steve: according to http://www.littletechshoppe.com/ns1625... disk cost ~$0.08 / mb in 1998, which comes out to >$800,000 for 1 TB or just over a million bucks in todays dollars. so maybe not millions, but a million! - Karl Rosaen

Russ: It runs Debian. If you were rolling your own (and they don't sell these units), you could turn on NFS or some other protocol (CIFS, iSCSI). They only use HTTP because it's cloud storage. NFS license is a major expense on NetApp, but all the major Linux distributions can act as NFS servers, CIFS servers, and probably iSCSI targets. - Andy Dustman

Andy: I know that you could do that on them but it leaves the problem of what to do with the storage. You could merge the 3 volumes into an LVM VG but the performance could become an issue with any load on it. It seems I wasn't the only one to question the performance, while the views of a Sun engineer aren't exactly unbiased it does highlight some of the downsides: http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archive... - Russ

Russ, great find, thanks. - Jason Wehmhoener

Fascinating article; but more questions: "In rough terms, every time one of our customers buys a hard drive, Backblaze needs another hard drive." -- so what happens when a drive fails; how much redundancy is there? What happens when a meteorite destroys the whole building; is there off site backup too? (I know this *is* the off-site backup, but still...) I wonder how much data flows in and out over time. Maybe I should just read their website. - Rob Fisher

Rob: they mention using 15 drive RAID6 volumes that can lose up to 2 drives before failure - Mike Chelen

The worst part about this cluster design is the fact that I couldn’t shut up about it for the first couple days after finding out about it. It was the solution I proposed to every problem. There were complaints. - A Mitchell

IMO RAID6 is not that great. Granted, it's highly unlikely to lose 3 drives at the same time, but there's still possibility. Besides, for write-intensive app, parity calculation is quite time-consuming. I personally prefer RAID 10 (striped array of RAID1 pairs). Yes the effective usable space is less than half total capacity, but for backups -- which will sooner or later be used to restore something -- I prefer data integrity over usage efficiency. - Pandu ● IT Optimizer from fftogo

There will still be a need for some data centers. But cloud computing is going to make them smaller or, in some cases, non existent. The author states the following reasons for data center survival: compliance, privacy, fear, control, and cost. Every one of these things will significantly change in the future. This seems to be a flaw in the author's argument. - Michael Carter from iPhone

If all that information in the cloud is not stored within a data center, where is it? - jcunwired

The "cloud" is a large, distributed data center so the data is still stored in a data center. The data center just may not reside on your premises. - Michael Carter from iPhone

Lot's of companies hire racks in ultra secured data centers. Wether it's inside your company, outside or "in the cloud" it's still in a data center. - Michiel Sikkes

+1 Rob. Most of the work I do is in the UK Banking sector. Despite the media stories about data loss, the rules and regs around data storage, transmission and protection are such that the corporate data center is safe for a while to come, I think. - Andrew Terry

From a risk perspective, it would interesting if the data centers comprising The Cloud were to consolidate into a handful scattered around the globe. In that scenario it's possible that a network outage could take out a significant percentage of available Cloud services in one stroke. I suppose that depends on how & if the market consolidates, but it is entirely within the realms of possibility. - Aaron Schaub from iPod

No - PierG from iPhone

Aaron, that is doubtful, even if there is consolidation, multi-level redundancy needs to be built into the infrastructure so that any outage at a single, or even multiple DCs would or should still provide access to the information by failing back to another DC close by, or even in another country. Take a look at some of the articles about how Google do Gmail etc. Only a perfect storm can take it out really... although there is always a chance ;) - Travis Koger

My feeling is this. Use the cloud for the convenience it offers. But never trust it. - Gregg H.

Fantastic title - JonathanJoseph

Great post. - Matt Cutts

We don't actually trust horseless carriages: That's why we have insurance, and roadside repair, and so on. The question is whether, in moving to the cloud (which, by and large, we aren't at the moment - at least outside of mainstream geekery) we have enough insurance. - Ian Betteridge

I think Dare's point is that we may not trust them completely, but we use them and they work well for us. The same as "computers and ... lawyers" from the article. - Matt Cutts

i expect our data and applications will move to the cloud, then maybe hardware advances will bring the data and applications back to us when capabilities allow and then ultimately out to the cloud because at that point the real time information created by each individual will probably be too much. - Iggy Mwangi

The problem with this cloud stuff - it's counter to human nature. That nature that tells us to stock up when we see bargains, preventing us from pick up milk in a supermarket, walking out with only milk. That forces netbook shoppers to demand roomy hard drives, clunky operating systems, bigger screens & even dvd burners just to use firefox. That causes people to ignore the 8GB iPhone because there's bigger and you might need that storage. That drives consumers to bigger Mpx cameras with increased features. - Ian Tindale

There's a new SyncML app for iPhone that let's you sync with multiple SyncML services - Jason Carreira

@Jason: Care to share what it is? - Justin Korn

I like to think conspiracy but then I find that more fun then the realities of development schedules. - Shawn McCollum

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r... - Jason Carreira

Nailed it with .NET! Yay :D I wonder how .NET will be when I graduate in 4 years... - Yuvi

Even better: Linq for NHibernate :) - Michael Hocter

I am using Linq with SP's - Alex Sauceda from fftogo

Dude - I was talking to a buddy that works at MS - he was telling me about plinq - Parallel Linq. Say you have a linq loop to process or build some data... by adding one keyword plinq will run the loop on all your processors simultaneously. He says that makes stuff go stupidly fast. That'll be part of .NET 4 which he says should be out next year. I think there's a community preview right now though... - Chrimmus Tad

@Micheal: I believe LINQ for NHibernate isn't really 'nailed' yet? And, it doesn't have the designer that EF has? (I'm a virgin in both NHibernate and EF, so forgive me if I say something stupid) - Yuvi

@Tad - D00d, I've been using PLINQ since the CTP came out a coupla months ago and allow me to say that it's totally effin effin awesome. I mean, just so totally effin awesome. effin. - Yuvi

Yuvi - I wish I had the time you have to play with all the cool CTP stuff. :) - Chrimmus Tad

LINQ to SQL and other ORM's are good for basic CRUD's, but when performance counts (searches, reports etc), I'd rather write SQL/sprocs by hand - Jemm

Wait until the next CTP of Visual Studio comes out soon-ish. It's good, good stuff. - Akiva Moskovitz

Joni - the perf stuff I've seen shows that there's very little performance loss if any when using linq. Have you seen otherwise? I'll take the time I save from having to write sql in my .net code over a 0.000005% increase (my made up sarcastic statistic) any day. :) That said, linq works just fine with sprocs, so still not a reason to not use it. - Chrimmus Tad

@Joni - I heard LINQ to SQL chokes if you use it for a large number of updates/deletes/inserts. *heard* - not seen first hand. - Yuvi

Dear Akiva - do you have any inside sources/outside sources? One d00d waiting for 2k8 SP1 here. - Yuvi

I'm actually working a contract with Visual Studio right now. Of course, I can't really give anything away but it's coming very soon and we're all very, very happy with it. I'm writing code on the latest builds of 2k8 every day. - Akiva Moskovitz

For most normal operations it is fast enough but the special situations (20%, maybe) require some work by hand. And yes, sprocs can be called from the LINQ, too. :) - Jemm

@Akiva - Latest build of VS 2k8? *swoon* *thud* - Yuvi

*jealous* damn I need a new job, but there's not much of ANYTHING here in Phoenix with .net 3.5... *pout* - Chrimmus Tad

@Akiva - hey, I can ask you 'bout your IDE Code Editor coloring scheme, right? Don't tell me it's the default Blue+Black on White courier! @Tad - yours? - Yuvi

Mine's still just the default - I've gotten used to it over the years. If I could find a GOOD scheme that mimic'd TextMate on the mac I might try it out. - Chrimmus Tad

@Tad - It's not even Consolas? o_O - Yuvi

Not familiar with that Yuvi... Linkage? I code on so many different machines/platforms that I usually just end up with whatever the default is. I used to care a lot more when all my screens were CRTs, but LCDs are so much easier on my eyes. - Chrimmus Tad

Well, I get new drops every day but I don't install them! I'd waste an hour of my day every day. - Akiva Moskovitz

Yuvi, mine is definitely not default. Dark gray background with low constrast colorizations (lots of earth tones with some blues). The only white I have is for numerals. If I remember on Monday, I'll cut a screenshot of it. One of my co-workers who does code reviews for me absolutely hates it. - Akiva Moskovitz

Yuvi - just changed my font to Consolas, but that made me want to increase the font-size to 11... I'll see how this looks for a while. Neato - Chrimmus Tad

@Tad - http://www.codinghorror.com/blog... that should do it. - Yuvi

Neato cool Yuvi - I'll try some out. - Chrimmus Tad

Tad, Consolas for LIFE. Although you might want to check out a font called Dina (http://www.donationcoder.com/Softwar...). It's very, very readable at low font sizes and the lower-case 'm' is clear. A few coders I used to work with awhile back swear by it but I've gotten so used to Consolas that I just never saw the need for switching. - Akiva Moskovitz

@Akiva - Consolas for LIFE! Atleast, till something better comes out ;) I hated Monaco (the Textmate font). And, I use Consolas at point 13, so the 'unreadable at small font sizes' issue never arose for me :D - Yuvi

Yuvi, my colors are very similar to the second example from that page. - Akiva Moskovitz

Thanks Akiva! I'm trying Dina now. :) - Chrimmus Tad

@Akiva - Mine too - although not the same (Mine are slightly bigger, and most of the time they're VB9) ;) - Yuvi

I can't wait to start using linq! - Justin Korn from fftogo

I've to test out how LINQ is in Mono. Once I get the VM working.... - Yuvi

We were able to leverage Linq to build a strongly typed API to our database for our clients. It's VERY cool stuff. (And I say this as a total Mac fanboy.) - James (@willia4)

cool! I hate dealing DB coding :) - Tim Hoeck

Yuvi, Tad, Akiva, tried most of those settings and have lasted longest with this one : http://blog.wekeroad.com/2007... - Kamath (नमः)

@Kamath - I too had it till my last re-install ;) - Yuvi

Yea folks - any of you tried db4o? Rocks as well! - Yuvi

Yeah I downloaded Dina and set that as my default font. Gonna do that at work too. Love it! - Chrimmus Tad

Wow, this is a big step. However, I don't think this is the end of the Press Release. Corporate Blogs would still require people to go to them to read the information, Press Releases get sent to the media, which means you know who your information is going to. - Aram Zucker-Scharff from twhirl

It's big news for corporations; they have to be doubly careful what they say on their blogs, that it does (or doesn't) meet Reg FD standards.The press release isn't dead-- it's useful as a push tool and great for journalists (citizen or otherwise) to get basic facts in one place so they can have real conversations w/out having to ask minutiae like title, spelling, etc. But are press releases evolving? Oh yes. The post makes good points re SM but it will be interesting to see how it plays beyond the digerati - Merredith Branscombe