Comments on: Are You Ready for Open-Source Hardware?

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 08:48:42 +0000

so, to turn this into a real (i.e. collaborative) open-source hardware project, we have recently launched

where we are discussing the backblaze design and trying to further evolve it.

By: Fallout of the Backblaze Storage Pod post | Backblaze Blog

Fallout of the Backblaze Storage Pod post | Backblaze Blog — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:16:21 +0000

[...] Malik wrote about it at GigaOm, as did Robin Harris at StorageMojo, and Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing. Soon after, CrunchGear, [...]

By: » Are You Ready for Open-Source Hardware? : To Be or Not to Be @abdolian.com

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 07:48:40 +0000

[...] Are You Ready for Open-Source Hardware? Posted in September 22nd, 2009 by Farhad Abdolian in General, OpenSource, Technology Are You Ready for Open-Source Hardware? [...]

By: Flow » Blog Archive » Daily Digest for September 4th - The zeitgeist daily

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 08:35:27 +0000

[...] Shared Are You Ready for Open-Source Hardware? [...]

By: Links 02/09/2009: RHEL 5.4 Released; Skype Buyout Can Help Free Software | Boycott Novell

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 23:25:27 +0000

[...] Are You Ready for Open-Source Hardware? According to the Chaos Theory, in a giant system that has lots of interconnections, even the smallest action can have a massive impact. It’s more simply described by the butterfly effect. This theory has taken its toll on the software business, thanks to the rise of open-source software platforms. Today, I learned about a move made by Backblaze, a small San Francisco-based online back-up service that can cause a similar disruption in the storage industry. [...]

By: Roy Schestowitz (schestowitz) 's status on Wednesday, 02-Sep-09 22:34:29 UTC - Identi.ca

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 22:34:33 +0000

[...] Open-Source #Hardware is Materialising http://gigaom.com/2009/09/01/open-source-hardware/ [...]

By: Devin Knighton

Devin Knighton — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:53:20 +0000

Actually, unlimited online backup for $4.95 a month isn’t new. Mozy has been providing unlimited online backup since 2006 to over 1 million customers and protects over 15 petabytes.

Devin Knighton
Mozy Public Relations
Decho Corp.
devink@decho.com
http://www.mozy.com

By: Roger Weeks

Roger Weeks — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 17:04:14 +0000

I wonder what the power and cooling requirements for these shelves are. How “green” are they? I don’t see how you’d replace a defective drive without taking a whole shelf offline, either.

By: JM

JM — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:30:16 +0000

I’ve read this article as well as their blog and had a few questions:

* Even with 6 fans, I wonder how much heat does each box generate and whether 6 fans is enough to cool the system.
* From the vimeo video as well as the flickr snapshots, I noticed that the disks are very close to one another. I wonder how easy maintenance is for these types of setup. I also didn’t noticed a way for a way for the drives to be ejected easily (in case of drive failure).

Great article and product / idea though. I’d be very interested to learn more how they handle outages (if any)

By: alka

alka — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:38:01 +0000

ever heard of oracle runnin on SATA? or any of those big enterprise apps running on SATA? Can you use blackblaze over san?

By: Open Source Hardware: Bau dir dein eigenes 67-Terabyte-Speichermonster » t3n Magazin

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:12:12 +0000

[...] Nach Ansicht von Om Malik von GigaOM, könnte der Storage Pod ähnliche Auswirkungen auf den Storage-Markt haben, wie es die Open-Source-Software für das Software-Geschäft hatte. Wird der Storage Pod auch außerhalb von Backblaze ein Erfolgsmodell, so könnten Storage-Anbieter wie der Weltmarktführer EMC oder der Serverhersteller Sun Microsystems die Auswirkungen durchaus zu spüren bekommen. « vorheriger Beitrag [...]

By: opensourcegeek (opensourcegeek) 's status on Wednesday, 02-Sep-09 13:03:36 UTC - Identi.ca

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:03:42 +0000

[...] http://gigaom.com/2009/09/01/open-source-hardware/ a few seconds ago from web [...]

By: Richard

Richard — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:05:27 +0000

The big part missing from the analysis is support: NetApp, Sun (with ZFS and storage products) and others will all deliver bugfixes with some sort of SLA, as well as hardware support, none of which you get with a build your own approach. BackBlaze are providing their own hardware and software support, which makes sense as their volumes are so enormous – those with less need for storage may find commercial offerings are better.

This is also why people pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) support when they can get virtually identical software (down to the bugs and fixes) from CentOS, who rebuild every release of RHEL from source. Part of the support payments to Red Hat is to fund Linux kernel developers. Novell does something similar of course with SUSE Linux.

Depending on volume of storage and in-house guruhood, it can pay to in-source support of hardware and/or software.

By: Richard

Richard — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 08:59:58 +0000

Interesting hardware design and it’s good they are publishing the details. However, it would be a lot more useful if they would also distribute the open-source stack they are using, including its configuration: Linux, JFS, etc.

And of course they are not giving away the real secret sauce referred to at the end: the higher level software stack that maps a backup request into specific encrypted blocks on a storage server, including de-duplication, incremental storage, etc.

By: Gleb Budman

Gleb Budman — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:14:12 +0000

I just wanted to clarify that we are giving away the complete design for the Backblaze Storage Pods (which is the hardware plus the software stack that brings it online) but not an SDK or the code for the online backup service itself.

Appreciate the perspectives and comments,

Gleb Budman
CEO, Backblaze

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 22:40:06 +0000

Hahnfield

It is clear that Backblaze expects some ODMs in Asia or other new hardware start ups to build on their design so that more people will have a chance to buy big storage cheaper.

The way the company described to me, they are giving away the whole shebang including the code and SDK so people can build on the whole system. I think that is what makes this more disruptive than usual.

Thanks for your awesome comment. Enjoyed learning from you.